I think there might be reasonable concerns, frankly. Not all traffic instructions are in picture format and there might be rather important instructions a passenger feels necessary to give even after having indicated where they initially wanted to go... things like "Oh crap, I've forgotten my heart medication. I need to go back home and get it"
For there to be some reasonable standards regarding a driver being able to understand both the customer and the road signage would seem to make perfect sense.
I think, as a Brit, I can explain the way the law has been structured here...
You see, culturally we love Whac-A-Mole style games. The current decision-making generation having grown up with them in arcades and fairs and there is a massive sense of nostalgia for them.
Hence, when there is an opportunity to enact legislation that has you striking down a website only to encourage dozens of near-identical ones to pop up overnight... well - we go all starry-eyed and start humming old 8-bit arcade tunes to ourselves.
I think you're referring to Simon Singh's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Singh) case and he won (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/apr/01/simon-singh-wins-libel-court).
As a consequence of that case, and a long campaign by leading scientists and journalists the libel laws were reformed, amongst other things introducing a public interest clause that applies to scientific publishing, journalism etc.
Which is what makes climate change conspiracy ideas so strange to me. The big money is with singing on with big pollution-laden fossil fuel companies to deny human-driven climate change. Instead the majority of opinion is with the science rather than the cashflow.
Now - I'm not saying there's no grants to be had on the other side of the fence, clearly there are. But it's not where the big money is.
He's alleging (even if indirectly) that thousands of academics the world over are deliberately suppressing the truth about climate change and producing a common story about what is happening to the climate and why.
I've worked in a university and I know full well that getting 3 academics in a room generally means having at least 4 opinions on any given topic. Getting academics to agree on anything is like herding cats. I would almost like there to be a grand conspiracy of thousands of academics. It would be the proof I require that they _can_ be induced to agree on a topic;p
This is tricky. It's tempting to support legacy browsers, but if you do too good a job of supporting them, you don't incentivize your users to ever get their sh*t sorted, and upgrade their browsers. It's a vicious cycle I am eager to avoid.
Yes- and providing seat belts means you lose the incentive to drive carefully. Except you don't. There's a lot of other reasons to drive carefully in the same way there's a lot of other reasons to use modern browsers. Insisting that a bunch of potential customers use a browser they aren't happy with isn't a way to get them to change, it's a way to lose potential customers.
In the real world you support the technologies that your customer base wants supported or you go under. The opportunities to dictate technology stack to your customers are few.
Efficient energy storage, though, is a massive barrier to using renewable energy sources. Creating energy from renewable sources is comparatively easy compared to the task of storing it and transporting it. You can have all of the wind farms and solar cells you like but you need storage to cope with those times where the weather isn't playing ball.
If this yields, even in the long term, efficient storage then it's a gateway technology to the useful deployment of renewables. Of course - that efficiency will need to be both energy-in -> energy-out efficiency and storage density efficiency to really hit the nail on the head.
I can but they're most corporate intranet. Our internal IT seem to be using a somewhat tweaked version of Bootstrap (v3.x) and that works well on my high-def dual screen setup, my cheap work mobile and my tablet. No loss of information. The UI shifts around a bit but not confusingly.
For internet-accessible sites, er.. can't say I visit many on anything but a desktop/laptop. I access some on my mobile devices but nothing regularly enough to be certain of their usability.
One quirk I did note in a responsive design recently was the airline web site I was using (jet2.com) where the information displayed was different from mobile to full site. It worked in my favour at the time as it pulled out immediate flight info to the for and pushed other information to the background. As it happened I was using my mobile in the airport so it was actually good. Not sure I'd feel the same way if I were at home and looking for more general information.
Ah - fair enough. I frequent a few regularly so I guess I just get to feel privileged that way:)
Part of the problem is that having a mobile site or a responsive design is a tick in a box for a lot of organizations. It's not something that management understand or even care about so long as they can tick it off and pass it up the chain for their objectives.
That's what's got me spooked about the Google changes. Will they just be doing the same?
Good responsive design shouldn't involve losing any information, only altering layout (and possibly UI) to make the information more accessible on a variety of different broswers whether they be mobile browsers or not.
It simply makes no sense to present most information the same way in browser running on a desktop machine with a panoramic screen the same way it is on a phone screen the user is holding in a portrait orientation.
Of course - there's plenty of examples of bad responsive design and I would very much prefer good non-responsive design to bad responsive design. But that's a very different choice than whether I would prefer equally good responsive to traditional design.
And here the issue lies. Google is very unlikely to be doing anything to verify the quality of the mobile version of a site beyond a few very basic tests.
You can carefully select software, be prudent about what you run and how it is configured and that goes a very long way towards affording you security. However, the issue remains as to how you best go about mitigating for the bugs that remain in even well-selected software.
Presuming that you are running a relatively complex system (and most of us do) then there is no hope you can have audited out all of the bugs that might be in the code. Using security software isn't a matter of being sure you stop everything (you can't be), it's about minimizing your risk with as little negative impact as you can.
Is a firewall sensible and practical? In almost every practical situation I've encountered the answer is yes.
Mandatory access control (such as AppArmor) to limit the capabilities of each program? Probably wise as it limits the scope of exploited bugs and once configured the negative impact is low.
Realtime heuristic scanning of executables and in-memory objects? Possibly - depends a bit on how paranoid you are.
Regular scans to determine if anything has changed on the system that shouldn't have? Probably sensible as the impact on you is low.
Virus-scanning isn't the be-all and end-all of security software. To take security seriously you need to take user education, software selection, auditing etc all into account but you can't ignore security software as if it does you no good at all. You can't treat it as a panacea and expect to install a produce (or set of products) and to declare yourself as safe but neither can your reject it wholesale. Security software is part of a rational approach to software just as seatbelt is part of a rational approach to keep you safe in a car. It doesn't solve the underlying problem but it sure as hell mitigates some of the risk.
Assange isn't a fugitive on the basis of a charge regarding his involvements with Wikilieaks. He is a fugitive from an arrest warrant pertaining to a charge of rape.
Whether he is guilty or innocent has yet to be determined by a court of law, hence the need for the judges to remain, and be seen to remain, entirely impartial. If those that have sympathy with him attend then and those that don't stay away than it guarantees him an unsympathetic judge if it ever comes to trial. That's not exactly in his best interest or the interest of justice in general.
This is quite clearly the right thing to do, especially if those judges have any sympathy for Assange.
Recording someone doing anything is neither pro or anti democratic. However, the use to which such a recording is put can be supportive of democratic principals.
If you assume that honest enforcement of law is fundamental to democracy (and many would) then using recorded footage in an attempt to bring about honest law enforcement could reasonably be considered to espouse "high democratic ideals" especially in circumstances where there is some risk to doing so.
It is easy to consider "democratic ideals" to apply only directly to the process of election of officials etc. However, a lot more has to be in place for democracy to work and a broader definition is, consequently, more useful.
Indeed - privacy is possible but not easy (for the average user at least) currently. Until it becomes easy, and obvious, most users will continue to find it all too bothersome to worry about. Now - it's easy to say "that's their lookout" but life gets a fair bit more private for everyone at the point where those who would be snooping on private communications if there is so much that they can't just cherry-pick the stuff that looks suspiciously protected.
What really strikes me is how well this current fumbled outing into marketing to youth culture really demonstrates the inability to understand that culture and what might motivate its members.
We already had ample indications that the recording industry, as a whole, was seriously struggling with the paradigm shifts of the digital age but this really does suggest floudering at a much deeper level of connect with their customer base.
To be honest, for somewhere of that size I'd be tempted to use some sort of client-based filtering (along the lines of spambayes [http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/]) which would put the power and responsibility in the hands of your users.
This might be especially true given the predominance of VM-based test-rigs these days. The cycle for a lot of us is snapshot-install-test-revert to snapshot and then repeat. In that scenario this sort of bug is far less likely to be noticed.
OK - here's what I've experienced working in Higher Ed for 7 years now...
There are a lot of similiarities and a few notable differences. The biggest difference comes from a general difference in direction for the organisation. HE institutions aren't profit-focused and as a result a few things happen:
1. The dynamics of the politics is somewhat different - without profitability driving everything forward the prestige is shared out between different departments on very traditional views of their worth rather than any realistic impression of their contribution to the organisation. The main point for you here is that IT gets less prestige in HE than in most profit-chasing organisations.
2. A lot HE places don't run projects on the people+plan+leader+timescale+resources model. They run it more along the person+er??? model. It's really worth checking how a place puts its projects together before signing up or you can end up being lost in an under-resourced project that goes on forever.
3. Resourcing... HE isn't rich but it has access to some resources very cheaply. So - research grads to help out, books, network access, training, labs etc are all likely to be relatively readily available whilst some of the more traditional resources (money, equipment etc) may be a little more scarce.
4. The head-honchos. Working out who you need to impress in a HE institution can be trickier than it looks. Often the people with the power are very much behind the scenes. We love our figureheads and we love, even more, for them to have no real power whatsoever;) If you're looking to impress and move on to bigger things within the sector make sure you put some effort into working out who really holds the power (usually people like academic standards boards, research committees etc).
I agree, I've seen a lot of angry people out there who've been caught in the back-wash of a subnet ban:-(
Yep, as usual in life, intelligence is the way to go:-) I must admit that I'm pretty happy with my installation of a bayesian filter. It's fast, accurate and I haven't seen any of my 80-220/day spams in the past few weeks. Suprisingly I haven't had any false positives or negatives for over two weeks either:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I think there might be reasonable concerns, frankly. Not all traffic instructions are in picture format and there might be rather important instructions a passenger feels necessary to give even after having indicated where they initially wanted to go... things like "Oh crap, I've forgotten my heart medication. I need to go back home and get it"
For there to be some reasonable standards regarding a driver being able to understand both the customer and the road signage would seem to make perfect sense.
I think, as a Brit, I can explain the way the law has been structured here...
You see, culturally we love Whac-A-Mole style games. The current decision-making generation having grown up with them in arcades and fairs and there is a massive sense of nostalgia for them.
Hence, when there is an opportunity to enact legislation that has you striking down a website only to encourage dozens of near-identical ones to pop up overnight... well - we go all starry-eyed and start humming old 8-bit arcade tunes to ourselves.
A license requirement that is enforced by the government.
The UK government is not involved in enforcing laws at all. They are involved in creating and repealing laws but not in enforcing them.
The BBC is explicitly a non-political organization and separate from government.
Hi,
I think you're referring to Simon Singh's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Singh) case and he won (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/apr/01/simon-singh-wins-libel-court).
As a consequence of that case, and a long campaign by leading scientists and journalists the libel laws were reformed, amongst other things introducing a public interest clause that applies to scientific publishing, journalism etc.
It's a very different landscape post reform bill.
Which is what makes climate change conspiracy ideas so strange to me. The big money is with singing on with big pollution-laden fossil fuel companies to deny human-driven climate change. Instead the majority of opinion is with the science rather than the cashflow.
Now - I'm not saying there's no grants to be had on the other side of the fence, clearly there are. But it's not where the big money is.
He's alleging (even if indirectly) that thousands of academics the world over are deliberately suppressing the truth about climate change and producing a common story about what is happening to the climate and why.
That sounds like a conspiracy to me.
... welcome our new spider overlords.
I've worked in a university and I know full well that getting 3 academics in a room generally means having at least 4 opinions on any given topic. Getting academics to agree on anything is like herding cats. I would almost like there to be a grand conspiracy of thousands of academics. It would be the proof I require that they _can_ be induced to agree on a topic ;p
This is tricky. It's tempting to support legacy browsers, but if you do too good a job of supporting them, you don't incentivize your users to ever get their sh*t sorted, and upgrade their browsers. It's a vicious cycle I am eager to avoid.
Yes- and providing seat belts means you lose the incentive to drive carefully. Except you don't. There's a lot of other reasons to drive carefully in the same way there's a lot of other reasons to use modern browsers. Insisting that a bunch of potential customers use a browser they aren't happy with isn't a way to get them to change, it's a way to lose potential customers.
In the real world you support the technologies that your customer base wants supported or you go under. The opportunities to dictate technology stack to your customers are few.
Efficient energy storage, though, is a massive barrier to using renewable energy sources. Creating energy from renewable sources is comparatively easy compared to the task of storing it and transporting it. You can have all of the wind farms and solar cells you like but you need storage to cope with those times where the weather isn't playing ball.
If this yields, even in the long term, efficient storage then it's a gateway technology to the useful deployment of renewables. Of course - that efficiency will need to be both energy-in -> energy-out efficiency and storage density efficiency to really hit the nail on the head.
I can but they're most corporate intranet. Our internal IT seem to be using a somewhat tweaked version of Bootstrap (v3.x) and that works well on my high-def dual screen setup, my cheap work mobile and my tablet. No loss of information. The UI shifts around a bit but not confusingly.
For internet-accessible sites, er.. can't say I visit many on anything but a desktop/laptop. I access some on my mobile devices but nothing regularly enough to be certain of their usability.
One quirk I did note in a responsive design recently was the airline web site I was using (jet2.com) where the information displayed was different from mobile to full site. It worked in my favour at the time as it pulled out immediate flight info to the for and pushed other information to the background. As it happened I was using my mobile in the airport so it was actually good. Not sure I'd feel the same way if I were at home and looking for more general information.
Ah - fair enough. I frequent a few regularly so I guess I just get to feel privileged that way :)
Part of the problem is that having a mobile site or a responsive design is a tick in a box for a lot of organizations. It's not something that management understand or even care about so long as they can tick it off and pass it up the chain for their objectives.
That's what's got me spooked about the Google changes. Will they just be doing the same?
Good responsive design shouldn't involve losing any information, only altering layout (and possibly UI) to make the information more accessible on a variety of different broswers whether they be mobile browsers or not.
It simply makes no sense to present most information the same way in browser running on a desktop machine with a panoramic screen the same way it is on a phone screen the user is holding in a portrait orientation.
Of course - there's plenty of examples of bad responsive design and I would very much prefer good non-responsive design to bad responsive design. But that's a very different choice than whether I would prefer equally good responsive to traditional design.
And here the issue lies. Google is very unlikely to be doing anything to verify the quality of the mobile version of a site beyond a few very basic tests.
You can carefully select software, be prudent about what you run and how it is configured and that goes a very long way towards affording you security. However, the issue remains as to how you best go about mitigating for the bugs that remain in even well-selected software.
Presuming that you are running a relatively complex system (and most of us do) then there is no hope you can have audited out all of the bugs that might be in the code. Using security software isn't a matter of being sure you stop everything (you can't be), it's about minimizing your risk with as little negative impact as you can.
Is a firewall sensible and practical? In almost every practical situation I've encountered the answer is yes.
Mandatory access control (such as AppArmor) to limit the capabilities of each program? Probably wise as it limits the scope of exploited bugs and once configured the negative impact is low.
Realtime heuristic scanning of executables and in-memory objects? Possibly - depends a bit on how paranoid you are.
Regular scans to determine if anything has changed on the system that shouldn't have? Probably sensible as the impact on you is low.
Virus-scanning isn't the be-all and end-all of security software. To take security seriously you need to take user education, software selection, auditing etc all into account but you can't ignore security software as if it does you no good at all. You can't treat it as a panacea and expect to install a produce (or set of products) and to declare yourself as safe but neither can your reject it wholesale. Security software is part of a rational approach to software just as seatbelt is part of a rational approach to keep you safe in a car. It doesn't solve the underlying problem but it sure as hell mitigates some of the risk.
Assange isn't a fugitive on the basis of a charge regarding his involvements with Wikilieaks. He is a fugitive from an arrest warrant pertaining to a charge of rape. Whether he is guilty or innocent has yet to be determined by a court of law, hence the need for the judges to remain, and be seen to remain, entirely impartial. If those that have sympathy with him attend then and those that don't stay away than it guarantees him an unsympathetic judge if it ever comes to trial. That's not exactly in his best interest or the interest of justice in general. This is quite clearly the right thing to do, especially if those judges have any sympathy for Assange.
Recording someone doing anything is neither pro or anti democratic. However, the use to which such a recording is put can be supportive of democratic principals. If you assume that honest enforcement of law is fundamental to democracy (and many would) then using recorded footage in an attempt to bring about honest law enforcement could reasonably be considered to espouse "high democratic ideals" especially in circumstances where there is some risk to doing so. It is easy to consider "democratic ideals" to apply only directly to the process of election of officials etc. However, a lot more has to be in place for democracy to work and a broader definition is, consequently, more useful.
Not the first and not the last but maybe it will prop up companies selling rubber-band launchers....
Indeed - privacy is possible but not easy (for the average user at least) currently. Until it becomes easy, and obvious, most users will continue to find it all too bothersome to worry about. Now - it's easy to say "that's their lookout" but life gets a fair bit more private for everyone at the point where those who would be snooping on private communications if there is so much that they can't just cherry-pick the stuff that looks suspiciously protected.
"Professor shocked that people act like people!"
:(
I'm amazed that this passed peer review, amazed it got attention online and even more amazed I'm commenting on it myself
I guess it's just troll-bait from an professional flamer...
What really strikes me is how well this current fumbled outing into marketing to youth culture really demonstrates the inability to understand that culture and what might motivate its members.
We already had ample indications that the recording industry, as a whole, was seriously struggling with the paradigm shifts of the digital age but this really does suggest floudering at a much deeper level of connect with their customer base.
To be honest, for somewhere of that size I'd be tempted to use some sort of client-based filtering (along the lines of spambayes [http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/]) which would put the power and responsibility in the hands of your users.
This might be especially true given the predominance of VM-based test-rigs these days. The cycle for a lot of us is snapshot-install-test-revert to snapshot and then repeat. In that scenario this sort of bug is far less likely to be noticed.
Now that doesn't happen often... or.. well... ever...
OK - here's what I've experienced working in Higher Ed for 7 years now...
;) If you're looking to impress and move on to bigger things within the sector make sure you put some effort into working out who really holds the power (usually people like academic standards boards, research committees etc).
:)
There are a lot of similiarities and a few notable differences. The biggest difference comes from a general difference in direction for the organisation. HE institutions aren't profit-focused and as a result a few things happen:
1. The dynamics of the politics is somewhat different - without profitability driving everything forward the prestige is shared out between different departments on very traditional views of their worth rather than any realistic impression of their contribution to the organisation. The main point for you here is that IT gets less prestige in HE than in most profit-chasing organisations.
2. A lot HE places don't run projects on the people+plan+leader+timescale+resources model. They run it more along the person+er??? model. It's really worth checking how a place puts its projects together before signing up or you can end up being lost in an under-resourced project that goes on forever.
3. Resourcing... HE isn't rich but it has access to some resources very cheaply. So - research grads to help out, books, network access, training, labs etc are all likely to be relatively readily available whilst some of the more traditional resources (money, equipment etc) may be a little more scarce.
4. The head-honchos. Working out who you need to impress in a HE institution can be trickier than it looks. Often the people with the power are very much behind the scenes. We love our figureheads and we love, even more, for them to have no real power whatsoever
Hmmm... hope the above is helpful
I agree, I've seen a lot of angry people out there who've been caught in the back-wash of a subnet ban :-(
:-) I must admit that I'm pretty happy with my installation of a bayesian filter. It's fast, accurate and I haven't seen any of my 80-220/day spams in the past few weeks. Suprisingly I haven't had any false positives or negatives for over two weeks either :-)
Yep, as usual in life, intelligence is the way to go