Because when you buy a laser printer, you are generally paying the full or actual price for that printer. The consumables therefore tend to more closely reflect the actual cost of producing toner.
When you buy an ink-jet printer, you are generally paying an artificially low price. The manufacturer then makes their money back by selling artificially expensive consumables. This is an ongoing cost of owning the printer, so the manufacturer continues to enjoy a high profit margin on the ink long after they have already made back the difference between the artificially low price and a more realistic price.
Microsoft did something like this with the Xbox. The Xbox itself was sold at a loss and the idea was to make back that money by selling games. That's one reason they tried to prevent people from modding the Xbox such that it could be used as a cheap computer, as this would guarantee that they never make back that initial loss on the hardware.
The "cost" to manufacture and distribute printer ink and printer cartridges is very low. It's the artificially-high "price" of printer cartridges for consumers that's the problem.
If most consumers today weren't so stupid and just stopped buying printer ink at the current prices, it'd drop in price quite quickly. Even at just 25% of the current price, the manufacturers would still be making huge profit margins.
The ink-jet printers are sold at a very low price, one that is not very profitable (if at all) for the manufacturer in isolation. It's not in isolation, however, because they make that money back by selling the consumable ink at a high mark-up. Effectively, the customer is paying a lower price up-front in exchange for an overall higher price over time. The printer companies are counting on the customer to be enticed by the initial low price without considering the overall deal, which would require some thought. Like many companies that assume the thoughtlessness of their customers, this has worked out well for them, unfortunately.
The same principle is in effect for many car loans. I often see car commercials that advertise a vehicle but either do not specify the total price or the total price is de-emphasized. What is emphasized is the monthly payment, and usually for a 60-month loan. A car loan with such a long duration is a great way to end up upside-down on the vehicle (owe more money than it is worth). It also means that the total price you pay for the vehicle is significantly higher than either the list price or a loan with a more reasonable duration. But people who don't consider these things see a low monthly payment and make their decision on this basis alone.
In both cases, the customer gets somewhat screwed just so they can have their shiny right now. Neither arrangement would appeal to a more financially conscious, savvy customer. Generally the "gotta have it right now" crowd experiences a short-term gain of convenience and a long-term loss of money. It's one reason why the USA has a negative savings index and is generally a culture of debt. Because of this behavior, most car dealerships make a modest profit from selling the vehicles and a large profit from financing them.
The irony of course is that the US not only has the worst coverage it also has the most expensive healthcare in the world while also having a lower life expectancy than most other 1st world countries.
So to everyone who decrys the systems in Switzerland, France, Canada, UK, etc remember this. They save more lives, they result in a longer average life expectancy and they don't kill their citizens because they've lost their job. and they cost less, often half or less of the US spend per capita
I don't think it's reasonable to expect truly good reform from the same systems, bureaucracies, and political forces who created the current US system. The current healthcare debate in the US seems to gloss over this fallacy entirely.
The practice of having employers provide health benefits dates back to World War II. During this time, the federal government instituted a wage freeze. Put simply, this meant that your employer could not give you a raise even if he wanted to. However, the wage freeze only included the actual dollar amount of the paycheck. So to get around this, employers kept the amount on the paycheck the same but started providing benefits that the employee normally had to purchase separately. They either provided those benefits entirely or they subsidized them. The amount of money that this saved the employee was the same as the raise the employer would otherwise have given. This allowed employers to offer competitive compensation packages that attracted and retained desirable talent while following the letter of the law.
Like the income tax, this was a "temporary emergency wartime measure." That temporary measure destroyed any competitive market that existed for health benefits. It set a precedent where most people's benefits come from their employer, often a large one with many employees. The effect has been that to this day, an individual who independently purchases health insurance has no bargaining power. They are up against corporations with thousands of employees who can negotiate better prices in a way that individuals cannot. The individual generally receives a non-negotiable, "take it or leave it" offer in a market full of major players and little competition.
It also makes employees more dependent on their employers than what is strictly necessary. How many people stay with a job they don't really like because they are worried about losing their benefits? How many people lose their benefits when they lose a specific job, even though they could otherwise replace the income? In my opinion, the ideal balance is when the company needs its employees just as much as the employees need the company. Anytime that is not the case, the side which is more dependent gets the short end of the stick in any matter of bargaining or negotiation. Healthcare is just one of many ways that the corporations generally have us over a barrel, and know it.
I'd like to see all of that fixed. That would be real reform, or at least a good start. If that still doesn't work, then in the specific case of the USA I would be open to the idea of socialized health care. Right now most of what I am hearing in the news, from our leaders, consists of proposals for partial implementations of socialized care, except they go to some trouble to avoid calling it that, preferring to call it a "public option" etc.. I'm really not impressed. The unwillingness to call things what they are is better known as deception. The only reason for our politicians to be deceptive about this is because they are more interested in power than a smoothly-working system. I think this, above all, is what turns off many Americans to the prospect of socialism. If socialism turns out to be the right answer, it won't be because these clowns implemented it.
"Many spammers now have large staffs of people working on nothing but building out completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. The spammers use these personas to create accounts Doesn't that make them astroturfers, not spammers?
Either way, that's a decently high level of dedication and sophistication. In any other context, this behavior would be called infiltration.
The best way to deal with spam is to do something about the people who enable them. Spammers are enabled by purchasing anything from them and by getting tricked by them (i.e. phishing). There are several ways to reduce both. I for one favor some kind of penalty or stigma for the former and education for the latter. The latter could be identified when they report the theft. Catching the former wouldn't be so difficult either. Just as police conduct sting operations, fake spam offers could be created for the purpose of identifying users who respond favorably to them.
At some point, a computer system becomes so secure that it's much easier to compromise its users, via social engineering. Likewise, at some point spammers become so sophisticated and so good at obfuscating their identities that it's much easier to reduce their revenues. The techniques and methods that spammers use has changed greatly over the years. The ways that they fund themselves and stay in business have changed very little by comparison.
In the US you can't even drink beer till you're in your final year.
And 80% of the students I met while in college were idiots and couldn't handle it responsibly during their final year or any of the years before hand when they were drinking it illegally
You seem to be arguing that the drinking age of 21 is not sufficiently high, that if the goal of such a drinking age is to promote responsible use, then this goal has not been realized. I'd like to respond to that. Specifically, I'd like to challenge the notion that age has much to do with this.
In the USA, alcohol is given some kind of special significance that many other places do not ascribe to it. There are taboos surrounding it. For those who are not of legal drinking age, there is a "forbidden fruit" nature to it. The ABC laws and their numerous convoluted restrictions (like places where it's illegal to buy or sell alcohol on a Sunday) reveal a big deal that's made of it which is Puritannical in nature. The fact that it's illegal well into early adulthood also means that youth are not generally taught about and allowed to demonstrate its responsible use by their parents.
That's what we get for the law-and-order mentality which says that "we don't like this thing, therefore it must be restricted no matter how high the social costs may be; after all, if we just punish enough people with enough severity, all our problems will go away!" It's the same principle in effect for the War on (some) Drugs.
That 80% you experienced were young adults who went directly from "this is totally forbidden" to "no restrictions so now you're on your own" with no transition period. Of course this is going to cause problems. Everyone was so busy telling them that it's forbidden, coming up with restrictions and ways to enforce them, and bemoaning the ills of alcohol that they spent no time equipping them to handle it responsibly. You say 80%, I say it would be a miracle if the percentage is so low.
Contrast that with some European countries where the legal drinking age is more like 16. Teens younger than that might have a glass of wine at the dinner table, under the supervision of their parents. There is no mystique or taboo attached to it. It's just a drink, albeit one that needs to be handled correctly. Oddly enough, those countries don't have drunk-driving and alcohol abuse problems to nearly the same degree as the USA. Coincidence? I dunno...
I agree that a five-year wait is a big problem, especially for things that develop at a fast pace like software or networking. But, to me that doesn't mean we should scrap the whole idea of open standards and open protocols. It means we should improve the processes by which those open standards are produced. We should profile them like any algorithm and look for bottlenecks. We should do that with a ruthless willingness to eliminate those bottlenecks.
I bet that there are no technical reasons why it takes 5 years or more to come up with an HTML standard. I bet that there are lots of political reasons for that. I bet that a small team of engineers could do a better job in less time than a bureaucratic committee.
And for sure, even if and when the standard *is* finalized, that won't be before all the big players have bartered with the comittee for concessions on alternative allowable formats
I think you identified the problem right there.
unfortunately we live in the real world where innovators cannot wait 5 years for technology to be debated, formalized, bartered, compromised and generally muddied into yet another worthless piece of documentation that is out of date before it's ever released.
Nothing is stopping them from innovating. They just can't legitimately call their independent innovations "HTML 5". That doesn't bother me. But what we get for that are ubiquitous yet proprietary things like Flash and all of the problems that come with them. I still think it'd be better to fix what's wrong with the processes we use to create open standards.
So I guess you'll not be using any of that "not-yet-finalized" html5 stuff, or any beta software from Google?
Terrible examples. I really don't think you appreciate the difference between open standards and proprietary "standards". That, or you understand it perfectly well but find it inconvenient for your argument, PR-style.
HTML5 is intended to be an open standard, so in this case you're making my point for me. There was a draft standard of HTML5 released January 2008. This too was produced openly. A vendor who produces something based on this draft standard is using the same specifications that are available to all other vendors. The same will be the case with the finalized standard.
That has not been the case with the proprietary draft-N implementations. Each vendor has their own version of draft-N. It's very similar to Microsoft's practice of embrace-and-extend. Interoperability with another vendor's implementation is not guaranteed. If you can't get Vendor X's equipment to operate with Vendor Y's equipment, or suffer reduced performance, neither vendor will file that as a bug and fix it. Instead, both will tell you "we recommend you use our products for all your networking needs". You think this is just like HTML5, that you're really comparing an apple to an apple here?
Most of the beta software that Google has released for download has been open source (Chromium, for example). Open source is no good if you want to implement a proprietary standard. It's great when you want the world to see precisely how something was done so they can interoperate with your software or port it to other platforms. Google obviously understands the value of this. That again serves to reinforce my point.
This is just another example of a phony debate tactic. If there's not a term for this, there should be. The procedure goes like this:
Ignore any points that the other person made. This is important. If anything the other guy said contradicts your position, just pretend that you didn't notice. Best foot forward, even at the expense of intellectual honesty. Besides, this way you don't have to waste your time with refutation and can get right down to expressing your predetermined conclusion.
Proceed to find anything the other person said that is generally true, and does apply for the specific examples that person gave. Then take the general truth to an absurd extreme.
Pretend like this says something about the validity of the general truth. Whatever you do, don't acknowledge that it says anything about your ability to interpret the general truth within a reasonable perspective.
Declare that the general truth is inherently absurd. State outright or imply strongly that it must be false in all cases. It was false when you took it to an absurd extreme well beyond its intended scope, so it must be totally useless in all cases. Right?
Congratulate yourself for your ability to handle argumentation. For extra points, assume that the other guy was a total idiot, that your trivial objections never occurred to him, and that the existence of such trivial objections could not possibly have indicated that you missed his point.
Betamax vs. VHS, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, now Wi-Fi draft N versus finalized standard draft N.
Open standards are a good thing. They avoid these kinds of problems. They promote interoperability. They also force vendors to compete on the merits of their implementations of those standards instead of competing on the basis of who is better at customer lock-in. It also lessens but does not remove the competition of who is the best at marketing.
If you care about assigning blame, it lies squarely on the people who purchased draft-N hardware. Whether they realized it or not, they were using their wallets to vote for this behavior. Those purchasing decisions reward this kind of behavior and make it profitable. Give companies the choice of agreeing on a standard or making no sales and they will agree on a standard every time.
Re:It was the blurst of times.
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Monkeys With Syntax
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
For the record, that isn't my blog. And I only agree with 75% of the blog author's opinions.
But let me please get this straight: according to you, anyone who disapproves of socialism is incapable of humor? Or anyone who dislikes Obama is undeserving of positive feedback from this group?
There's one thing that blogger is damn straight about. Things are not quite what they seem and we are being lied to. I can tolerate all kinds of differences in belief so long as there is the common ground of recognizing that. I don't like Obama either but it's not personal. No man who really has your best interests at heart needs a multimillion dollar campaign to convince you of that. That's the case with Obama and whoever else has any real chance at winning a presidential election. It really does not matter who is in office. It's about who has the money and power to put them there. In that sense they're all the same to me. None of them are going to do anything that is too contrary to the interests of their benefactors. That's going to be the case so long as we have the two-party duopoly.
Re:It was the blurst of times.
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Monkeys With Syntax
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Strangely enough, your sig link sucks any humor out of your triumphant 'FP!'. I'm surprised you didn't try to get the monkeys to start tea-bagging in the Name of Freedom. You could probably get them to go 'oo-oo-oo' if you presented them with an autographed copy of Sarah Palin's 'book'.
Go ahead, mod me as -1 Troll. Just make sure you mod parent as well.
I for one have no problem separating the man's political views from the humor in his post. He's entitled to them, and a link in a sig that I'd have to decide to follow does not constitute a case of him shoving those views down anyone's throat. Sorry but targeting him for that is worse than anything he could write in a blog. I actually view it as a tiny microcosm of how religious wars get started.
For what it's worth, I don't usually visit links in sigs. There are so many of them and I'd rather just read the comments. However, your comment piqued my curiosity and caused me to visit his blog. I think you gave him some free publicity.
I think in most cases it's probably due to some deep-rooted insecurity; however you can't ignore the fact that some people are just dicks and enjoy arguing for the sake of it and pissing people off.
I agree, except I will add one thing. It's something I may not ever be able to prove but I definitely know it to be true. Some people do enjoy being dicks and do enjoy arguing for the hell of it just to piss people off. However, they were not born that way. If you want rigorous mathematical proof of that, I cannot give it to you. You'll have to look within for that and see for yourself that you were born a certain way, and all of your life a wide variety of negative influences wanted you to be another, inferior way. But whether you can personally accept that or not, I know deep down that this is the absolute truth.
Someone used this sort of bully behavior on them, probably at a young age. Being on the receiving end of it left them with an either-or choice: "I do this to others or I have this done to me." With this kind of thinking, it's dominate or be dominated, agitate others or be agitated by them. Growing up in a world like this robbed them of the realization that you can effectively deal with a bully and put him in his place without becoming like him. When people get broken like this, they come to think it's a normal, inevitable part of life. In fact it's none of those things; it's a systemic, societal lack of understanding.
Why would interstellar civilization be much different?
They could evolve from creatures like us; the "negative" traits of ours that you describe are a byproduct of us being highly expansionist as a species. Highly successful.
For two reasons really. Note that I restricted my commentary to aliens who are benevolent. No offense is intended, but that's one of those little details that was there for a reason. Only benevolent/peaceful aliens would refuse to contact us because of our barbarism. Aliens who are malevolent have no reason not to just land here and take over the planet with superior weaponry. In fact that would be quite consistent with an expansionist policy. Since that has not happened, it's safe to assume that any intelligent extraterrestrial life that a) knows we exist and b) is able to travel here, is unwilling to contact us because of how we are.
My second reason is also simple. To cross distances measured in light-years, they would either need to be able to travel faster than light or they'd need to be able to fold space (that may be redundant, since folding space could be viewed as a method of FTL travel). Beings who can do that would need a free or very cheap source of infinite or nearly infinite energy. Wars tend to be about resources of one kind or another, though usually other justifications are cited for propaganda reasons. Such beings would have a whole galaxy of planets they can access and all the resources that come with them. They'd have advanced technology and infinite or nearly infinite energy sources. Beings like this wouldn't have very much to fight each other about.
I suppose they could have evolved from creatures like us, but if so, they were creatures like us in their dim past. Perhaps they came to realize that instincts which equip you for survival in the brutal world of "caveman days" are counterproductive for highly advanced civilization. Such instincts include but are not limited to tribalism and the "us against them" thinking that goes with it.
Like us, I'd imagine that they can learn to act in ways that are other than what their instincts would have them do, ways that inherently lead to a society marked by harmony and loving-kindness. Ways that are not based on fighting others for dominance over a limited gene pool in a deadly game of winner-take-all, with all the plotting and planning and manipulation that goes along with it.
Our modern models of statecraft are like this. I will describe in these terms the only advance that has taken place: what the kings of old did by openly threatening with the sword, the rulers of today accomplish covertly with propaganda and disinformation. Still the same job gets done, which is that when the State wants something from you, the State gets it. The State perfers that you do so willingly because you want to be a good patriotic citizen who knows his role, but for the few who won't conform to that, the State is authorized to use force or the threat of force.
For an advanced interstellar civilization, the real trick is to produce a culture where the more enlightened view is the norm, one that would view anything else as a rare aberration. The other real trick is to know yourself so well that you can evaluate the contents of your own mind and understand that this idea comes from an instinct, while that idea comes from trauma you experienced long ago, and this other idea comes from sound reason. Humans can learn to do that, though few ever try. With that power comes the ability to be your own person, to reject the influences that lead to negativity and disharmony because you know what they are and don't find them tempting. Why wouldn't an advanced, benevolent race of beings have the same ability?
I'm not sure which country that you live in, but where I live, the press and the scientists aren't controlled by the government.
The press is a much more complex subject. So I'll talk just about the scientists. Many of them are doing "pure research" of the sort that is unlikely to produce a profit in the near future, if ever. This covers the LHC and all sorts of other things. Because their work isn't expected to be profitable, those scientists are not financially self-sufficient. Most (nearly all?) of them receive government grants in order to fund their work. Who receives those grants and what kind of work gets funded depends ultimately on the politics of the time and the mainstream scientific theories of the time. So, you can only deny the control that government has over scientific research if you discount the power of the purse, and I submit that doing so would be a mistake.
I'll give a recent example. In 2001, George W. Bush used his political influence as President to decide that the government will not fund research on stem cells if those stem cells are derived from frozen embryos. This was pure politics and occurred not because of scientific objections, but because people with pro-life views had moral objections to this method of research. There were already existing stem cell lines that had already been harvested; regarding these from the point of view of pro-lifers the damage had already been done, therefore Bush did allow scientists to work on these existing stem cells. Whether you agree with that decision or not, it amounts to the political micromanagement of scientific research enforced by the power of the purse. So yes, the government has a great deal of control and they can exercise that in a purely budgetary fashion without passing a single new law.
The most compelling evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, is that they have not attempted to contact us.
That reminds me of the movie Aliens.
Ripley: "You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage."
Of course I think what would really deter intelligent life from contacting us is the fact that we have had the capability of feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating every last man, woman, and child on the planet since the Industrial Age and, for various reasons, have not done so. We also kill our own species more than any other creature on the planet and treat each other like dehumanized cogs-in-machines for the sake of our economic models (see what Erich Fromm had to say about alienation). We not only experience lies, manipulation, and other forms of treachery from our leaders and authorities, we expect it and accept it as normal.
By the standards of a truly advanced interstellar civilization, we must be quite barbaric indeed. They would be wise to stay away from us, because if they are benevolent, then any interaction with us would likely be to their detriment.
As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?
Because to a lot of people on/. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.
You might have meant that to be facetious (or maybe you didn't) but I have often noted the same. For most non-trivial things, there are matters of taste, preference, or opinion about which extremely informed experts can legitimately disagree. Yet there is often a great desire to make a pissing contest of these things. Some people have a very strong need to be right, and it's not good enough for them that they are "right"; someone else must also be "wrong". I believe this is rooted in some kind of personal insecurity. That is, they derive their personal security from trying to dominate or feel superior to others, rather than viewing personal security as something that comes from within. You really nailed it, however: the tendency is marked by an inability to disagree with someone on a matter of taste/preference/opinion without also portraying that person as stupid.
I suppose that behavior has some "success", if you want to call it that, among people who are either insecure themselves (and thus intimidated by the idea that someone might think they are stupid) or unfamiliar with argumentation. When used on such people, it must achieve the desired result of a sense of superiority at least some of the time, or else it would not be so commonly practiced. However, for anyone not fitting that description, such techniques immediately and unmistakably betray the weakness of the position of anyone who uses them. They can even make a position weak that otherwise would be factually or technically correct. Usually, they also reveal various personal shortcomings. This makes the use of such techniques a sure way to humiliate oneself when dealing with anyone who can see through them.
Sorry but everything Google do is opt-in by virtue of the fact you are opting to use their website
and
This has no effect on their tracking as they were doing that anyway
You do know that you contradicted yourself there, right?
FYI, Google does not track me because nothing on my network loads any of their analytics tools or other tracking devices. That's how you deal with an entity that will track you whether or not you ever use their services. By behaving this way, Google themselves have invalidated the quid-pro-quo arguments that may have been in favor of their methods.
That is, the argument goes that Google is providing free services and all they want is some of your data, so therefore it is fair enough for them to have it in exchange for those free services. This argument falls apart the moment I receive a Google tracking cookie for visiting a non-Google site and, this is key, it happens whether or not I ever use any Google services. At such time, they become intrusive and, since I don't discriminate, this causes me to treat them like any other intrusive influence; that is, they get blocked.
"Every once in a while a box will show up at my door: "You need this. We found it at an awesome price. You will be billed via Google Finance"."
I hope you are joking, because my creep-o-meter just went off the scale.
Another generation or two of advertising and propaganda, and people will be begging for this new feature. Once conditioned to it, they will be as disappointed by companies that don't offer it as they are today at the prospect of preparing their own meals or interpreting their own information. What amuses me (despite its minor inconvenience) is the way people on this site already try to portray privacy advocates as unreasonable, paranoid, and backwards. It's as though their message is, "you don't automatically welcome every marketing effort from corporate America with open arms? WTF is wrong with you?" Since when did siding with the marketers become the default position? Ever since some of them worked for Google? Does the name really do that much for you? If so that's some effective branding, but that's all it is.
That's particularly surprising on Slashdot, with a technical crowd who should be much more aware than the masses of how information can be gathered, used, and abused. You'd think that this crowd would more intuitively understand what you can do by cross-referencing bits of information from multiple sources, like what Google is in a position to do. You'd think that because of that, there would be more privacy advocates speaking out in discussions like this. But we have our favorites and they're precious to us, aren't they? Google can do no evil because they say so, now here, look at this shiny new feature and shut up. Right? Let's also sidestep the fact that anyone could potentially data-mine if it's alright for Google to do so. Privacy is in a sorry state right now, we need some strong protections for it, and marketing efforts like this personalized search should always be opt-in. Even if Google never does any evil to anyone, you have no reasonable expectation that everyone else will be so nice.
Good points, most of them. However, I would assert that:
The information generated by YOUR actions and recorded by other parties is YOUR property about as much as the memories other people have of you doing something silly at a family get-together.
That depends on whether those people follow me around to events to which they are not invited in order to have those memories. If they don't, then it's like when Google gets my IP address and search terms and I'm fine with that. If they do, then it's like when Google gets thousands of non-Google sites to host its tracking tools so they can track me whether or not I ever use their services, and I'm not fine with that.
Still, when I say it's mine, I refer to the fact that this data would not exist if I did not actively create it. I also refer to the fact that the Googles of the world need my assistance to obtain it. I have to load their pages, accept their cookies, and run their scripts (and several other things) for them to have it. I am under no obligation to do those things, and when I refuse to, they don't get my data or don't get nearly as much. So the data originates with me and is under my control, and that is the sense in which it is mine.
Every time you google, you need to be logged out of all google services: includes blogger, blogspot, picassaweb, youtube, and all the others like analytics, adsense, gmail....
Clear all your cookies.
Then reboot your home cable/dsl modem or whatever to get a new IP.
Then go ahead and do you searches.
Clear all your cookies.
Then reboot you home cable/dsl modem or whatever to get a new IP.
Then it's safe to log back in to google services.
That should cover you for all googlespying that involves google analytics and tieing your search queries to you.
Oh, what's that? You aren't THAT worried?
I appreciate that taking an idea to a ridiculous extreme, noting that the extreme to which you took it is ridiculous, and then concluding that the idea is therefore inherently flawed is a common discussion tactic around here. It's a good way to support a predetermined conclusion. By "predetermined" I mean that you take a position first and then look for ways to justify it, rather than researching the issue and seeking to understand the different approaches that can be taken. In that fashion you seem to have already decided that anyone who enjoys privacy is some kind of paranoid lunatic or must otherwise be an unreasonable person. If you're willing to consider a more moderate approach than the facetious one you have outlined, I'll explain my setup.
It's standard practice for the logfiles of a Web server to record the IP address of visitors to that site. In Google's case, it's expected that they will also keep logs of search queries. I am willing to accept that when I use Google's search engine, they can (and will) associate the search terms I use with my (dynamic) IP address. If I were really worried about that, I would use Tor, but I'm not really worried about that. I consider it fair enough and regard it as something to be expected since I am directly submitting that data to Google.
What I disagree with is when Google wants to use various techniques to track my usage of non-Google sites. That is not data I directly submit to them, but rather, that they go out of their way to obtain. I understand why they do it; I just don't like it and don't care to participate in it. To that end, I take various technical measures to make sure that they do not obtain this data. This isn't specific to Google; those measures are designed to prevent anyone from performing this kind of data mining on me. My machine just doesn't volunteer that kind of information to anyone. The information is extraneous in the sense that I can request a URL and receive the contents of that URL from the server, whether or not I allow that server to know where else I've been. So I regard all remote servers as being on a need-to-know basis, and when it comes to my browsing habits, they don't need to know.
This is an appropriate response to the opt-out nature of this kind of marketing. I never asked to be tracked and never signed a document stating that I consent to it. Furthermore, even if I never use a single Google service, other sites that I do visit would still help Google Analytics track my browsing. For that reason, even the quid-pro-quo arguments (your data in exchange for free services) are specious because they will try to obtain my data with no regard for whether I actually use their services. Whether I want it or not, I am tracked by default until and unless I take measures against it. Therefore, those measures are fair game and I am well within my rights to implement them.
Note that none of my arguments depend on Google doing anything "evil" with my data. Whether they use it in a perfectly benign way or whether they abuse it in every possible way, my arguments above still hold. That's why portraying privacy advocates as paranoid lunatics misses the point, though it's a cute way to sway those who don't know better. The data gathering amounts to taking something tha
Since that time I've done some un-scientific testing and found that OpenDNS's servers are consistently faster than my local ISP's. It'll take several moments to even look up a name with my local IPS's DNS. OpenDNS can find the server almost instantly.
This part interested me. All things being equal, you'd expect your ISP's server would respond more quickly because it's fewer hops away. However, all things are not equal because of the nature of OpenDNS. Specifically, I would assume that OpenDNS has many more users so it resolves, and thus caches, many more domains than your local ISP's servers. It sounds like in your situation, the benefit this gives you outweighs any latency incurred by querying a remote DNS server. Of course, we also don't know whether your ISP is doing a good job of administering its servers and making sure they can handle their load, so what really interests me is taking the ISP's DNS out of the picture and comparing OpenDNS to a local server.
If it's practical for you, have you ever tried running your own caching nameserver on your own computer? Your own caching server could either refer requests to another nameserver, such as your ISP's or OpenDNS, or it could directly query the root DNS servers of the world (like what your ISP and OpenDNS are doing). Here, I refer to the latter configuration and it's what I use for my own LAN. If you have ever tried this, how did its performance compare to OpenDNS?
Yes, it might be useful for people whose ISP DNS server is slow. That didn't happen to me since my dialup days. Besides, now I simply run my own caching DNS server. It's not hard to set up at all.
I wonder about this myself. Google is a marketing company so you would generally expect them to always appeal to the widest audience possible. As valuable as DNS service is, it's also not something that average users care about or think about. Most users who are dissatisfied with their DNS performance would say "the Internet is slow today" and not "I am experiencing unusually high latency from my ISP's DNS server". This is just a guess but they seem to be targeting two broad categories of user:
Users who are specifically dissatisfied with their current DNS performance. These are users who are knowledgable enough to understand what DNS is and that they can change servers, yet are unable to or reluctant to run their own caching nameserver.
Users who currently use OpenDNS, or who use an ISP DNS server that also breaks NXDOMAIN behavior in order to serve advertisements. Google also wants to serve advertisements, of course, but they do it without breaking the DNS protocol. For these users, switching to Google's server would be a way to protest these practices by voting with their feet.
You basically asserted that you could not conceive of a situation in which it would be difficult to set up and maintain your own DNS server.
You weren't thinking very hard.
My exact words were: "Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?"
I noted that my experience was not so difficult and asked him why his was. That's not the same as being unable to conceive of a situation in which difficulties could be encountered. I don't think you appreciate that there are multiple potential difficulties. I could come up with several of them; the trouble is that they'd be imaginary and may or may not reflect his actual experience. Rather than make a guessing game of it, I asked him about his specific situation. This bothers you?
I wasn't thinking very hard... or impressing you with my ability to play a guessing game is not among my priorities. You'll have to get over that, or failing that, you'll have to imply that I'm stupid for not proving my intellectual prowess to you (after all, the Earth revolves around you, right?). I guess I'm supposed to feel insulted and try to one-up you. I get it, though I don't think that you do.
You're capable of realizing that nothing I've said has insulted you in any way or otherwise justified your decision to be a dick about it. This doesn't bother me because it doesn't actually say anything about me. I consider it to be your problem, to be honest with you.
I appreciate that some people have a strong need for someone else to be wrong so they can feel right. The meaningless pissing contest you've tried to entice me into is just a way to serve that need. I realize that this can be difficult to grow out of, even if you can see that you do it. It provides what you might call a feeling of superiority, or a fake sense of worth for people who can't find the real thing within themselves. Understanding this as I do, I cannot in good conscience go along with it. Instead, I'm pointing it out on the slim chance that maybe you'll appreciate it.
Anyway, that's enough of this thread for me. The final word is all yours, if having it is significant to you.
Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?
You apparently don't dual-boot with Windows (e.g. for gaming), or if you do you don't care that Windows doesn't use your own personal DNS server. You also apparently don't have any other machines on your network.
Running your own DNS server on a non-trivial network is a relatively significant investment in time, equipment, or both. Why should my wife's laptop be unable to resolve sites while I'm rebooting or shut down for the night? Why should I have to maintain *two* DNS servers (one in Windows and one in Linux) if I want to dual-boot? Why should I have to set up a separate physical machine to run DNS (to avoid the multi-machine problem), which adds energy and maintenance costs?
The potential costs of your proposition are far greater than the benefits, especially when someone else (Google) is doing it all for free. And yet you think it's trivial.
Can you explain that discrepancy, please?
On second thought, don't bother - you obviously think "it's easy for me in my situation" is equivalent to "it's easy for everyone in every situation".
You are correct that I do not dual-boot. My machine just runs Linux all the time; there are no other operating systems installed on it. You are incorrect about it being the only machine on the network. There are several machines on this LAN and the others run Windows. Those Windows machines also use this DNS server. This network is behind a NAT router, so it was as simple as pointing the Windows machines at 192.168.x.x for their primary DNS. My Linux machine is up 24/7 barring the need to occasionally reboot to load a new kernel, but just in case my machine is not running, the Windows machines use the NAT router's IP address for the secondary DNS (the router proxies any DNS requests it receives to the ISP's DNS servers). In practice they don't ever have to use that, but if something should happen to my machine they will still have DNS service.
This was ridiculously easy for me to set up. Once configured, it has required zero maintainence, so I consider the several minutes to set it up to be a negligible cost, practically zero. Everyone using this network enjoys reliable, responsive DNS service and has done so for years now, which is a non-negligible benefit that we continuously receive. So let's see now, a near-zero several-minute cost and a significantly non-zero several-year/indefinite benefit. Yup, this passes any cost-benefit analysis that would apply.
You might have a setup that would make this difficult or infeasible in your situation. That doesn't mean it's universally a terrible idea for every person in all cases. Did you notice how my original post never once claimed that everyone should do this just because I do? Did you note that I asked the other guy to clarify instead of automatically adopting a condescending attitude towards him? That's because I never assumed that a solution that works well for me is going to be ideal for everyone else.
Now, do you care to lose the mock indignation and give me a real reason why you believe I have made a mistake here? If you're done telling me what I "obviously think" based on claims I never made, that is.
It's definitely true that, if you're already doing all of the work to run your own system at home, adding a DNS server isn't a big deal. But that's really a hobbyist thing to do. If your home system is primarily for the purpose of getting things done, rather than for playing with systems, it's an enormous amount of extra work. Yet having faster DNS lookups is still a win.
Personally I use MaraDNS. It's configured as a simple caching resolver that queries the root DNS servers. I installed it with my package manager, changed maybe two lines in a text configuration file, and added its startup script to my boot sequence. That's the end of my involvement with it. It just works. Any updates for it are handled automatically by the package manager (along with every other installed package) as part of my regular system maintainence and do not require any sort of manual intervention. Setting it up was maybe a ten minute job, and ever since then it's not something I ever have to think about or tinker with.
MaraDNS is not unusual in this regard; just about anything other than BIND is this easy to set up and BIND is not much more difficult either, at least not for a simple caching resolver. Incidentally, its adverse security history and the fact that it's overkill for my simple needs are my only reasons for not using BIND. Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?
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Why is laser ink so much cheaper than inkjet?
Because when you buy a laser printer, you are generally paying the full or actual price for that printer. The consumables therefore tend to more closely reflect the actual cost of producing toner.
When you buy an ink-jet printer, you are generally paying an artificially low price. The manufacturer then makes their money back by selling artificially expensive consumables. This is an ongoing cost of owning the printer, so the manufacturer continues to enjoy a high profit margin on the ink long after they have already made back the difference between the artificially low price and a more realistic price.
Microsoft did something like this with the Xbox. The Xbox itself was sold at a loss and the idea was to make back that money by selling games. That's one reason they tried to prevent people from modding the Xbox such that it could be used as a cheap computer, as this would guarantee that they never make back that initial loss on the hardware.
You're mixing up "cost" with "price".
The "cost" to manufacture and distribute printer ink and printer cartridges is very low. It's the artificially-high "price" of printer cartridges for consumers that's the problem.
If most consumers today weren't so stupid and just stopped buying printer ink at the current prices, it'd drop in price quite quickly. Even at just 25% of the current price, the manufacturers would still be making huge profit margins.
The ink-jet printers are sold at a very low price, one that is not very profitable (if at all) for the manufacturer in isolation. It's not in isolation, however, because they make that money back by selling the consumable ink at a high mark-up. Effectively, the customer is paying a lower price up-front in exchange for an overall higher price over time. The printer companies are counting on the customer to be enticed by the initial low price without considering the overall deal, which would require some thought. Like many companies that assume the thoughtlessness of their customers, this has worked out well for them, unfortunately.
The same principle is in effect for many car loans. I often see car commercials that advertise a vehicle but either do not specify the total price or the total price is de-emphasized. What is emphasized is the monthly payment, and usually for a 60-month loan. A car loan with such a long duration is a great way to end up upside-down on the vehicle (owe more money than it is worth). It also means that the total price you pay for the vehicle is significantly higher than either the list price or a loan with a more reasonable duration. But people who don't consider these things see a low monthly payment and make their decision on this basis alone.
In both cases, the customer gets somewhat screwed just so they can have their shiny right now. Neither arrangement would appeal to a more financially conscious, savvy customer. Generally the "gotta have it right now" crowd experiences a short-term gain of convenience and a long-term loss of money. It's one reason why the USA has a negative savings index and is generally a culture of debt. Because of this behavior, most car dealerships make a modest profit from selling the vehicles and a large profit from financing them.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect truly good reform from the same systems, bureaucracies, and political forces who created the current US system. The current healthcare debate in the US seems to gloss over this fallacy entirely.
The practice of having employers provide health benefits dates back to World War II. During this time, the federal government instituted a wage freeze. Put simply, this meant that your employer could not give you a raise even if he wanted to. However, the wage freeze only included the actual dollar amount of the paycheck. So to get around this, employers kept the amount on the paycheck the same but started providing benefits that the employee normally had to purchase separately. They either provided those benefits entirely or they subsidized them. The amount of money that this saved the employee was the same as the raise the employer would otherwise have given. This allowed employers to offer competitive compensation packages that attracted and retained desirable talent while following the letter of the law.
Like the income tax, this was a "temporary emergency wartime measure." That temporary measure destroyed any competitive market that existed for health benefits. It set a precedent where most people's benefits come from their employer, often a large one with many employees. The effect has been that to this day, an individual who independently purchases health insurance has no bargaining power. They are up against corporations with thousands of employees who can negotiate better prices in a way that individuals cannot. The individual generally receives a non-negotiable, "take it or leave it" offer in a market full of major players and little competition.
It also makes employees more dependent on their employers than what is strictly necessary. How many people stay with a job they don't really like because they are worried about losing their benefits? How many people lose their benefits when they lose a specific job, even though they could otherwise replace the income? In my opinion, the ideal balance is when the company needs its employees just as much as the employees need the company. Anytime that is not the case, the side which is more dependent gets the short end of the stick in any matter of bargaining or negotiation. Healthcare is just one of many ways that the corporations generally have us over a barrel, and know it.
I'd like to see all of that fixed. That would be real reform, or at least a good start. If that still doesn't work, then in the specific case of the USA I would be open to the idea of socialized health care. Right now most of what I am hearing in the news, from our leaders, consists of proposals for partial implementations of socialized care, except they go to some trouble to avoid calling it that, preferring to call it a "public option" etc.. I'm really not impressed. The unwillingness to call things what they are is better known as deception. The only reason for our politicians to be deceptive about this is because they are more interested in power than a smoothly-working system. I think this, above all, is what turns off many Americans to the prospect of socialism. If socialism turns out to be the right answer, it won't be because these clowns implemented it.
"Many spammers now have large staffs of people working on nothing but building out completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. The spammers use these personas to create accounts Doesn't that make them astroturfers, not spammers?
Either way, that's a decently high level of dedication and sophistication. In any other context, this behavior would be called infiltration.
The best way to deal with spam is to do something about the people who enable them. Spammers are enabled by purchasing anything from them and by getting tricked by them (i.e. phishing). There are several ways to reduce both. I for one favor some kind of penalty or stigma for the former and education for the latter. The latter could be identified when they report the theft. Catching the former wouldn't be so difficult either. Just as police conduct sting operations, fake spam offers could be created for the purpose of identifying users who respond favorably to them.
At some point, a computer system becomes so secure that it's much easier to compromise its users, via social engineering. Likewise, at some point spammers become so sophisticated and so good at obfuscating their identities that it's much easier to reduce their revenues. The techniques and methods that spammers use has changed greatly over the years. The ways that they fund themselves and stay in business have changed very little by comparison.
In the US you can't even drink beer till you're in your final year.
And 80% of the students I met while in college were idiots and couldn't handle it responsibly during their final year or any of the years before hand when they were drinking it illegally
You seem to be arguing that the drinking age of 21 is not sufficiently high, that if the goal of such a drinking age is to promote responsible use, then this goal has not been realized. I'd like to respond to that. Specifically, I'd like to challenge the notion that age has much to do with this.
In the USA, alcohol is given some kind of special significance that many other places do not ascribe to it. There are taboos surrounding it. For those who are not of legal drinking age, there is a "forbidden fruit" nature to it. The ABC laws and their numerous convoluted restrictions (like places where it's illegal to buy or sell alcohol on a Sunday) reveal a big deal that's made of it which is Puritannical in nature. The fact that it's illegal well into early adulthood also means that youth are not generally taught about and allowed to demonstrate its responsible use by their parents.
That's what we get for the law-and-order mentality which says that "we don't like this thing, therefore it must be restricted no matter how high the social costs may be; after all, if we just punish enough people with enough severity, all our problems will go away!" It's the same principle in effect for the War on (some) Drugs.
That 80% you experienced were young adults who went directly from "this is totally forbidden" to "no restrictions so now you're on your own" with no transition period. Of course this is going to cause problems. Everyone was so busy telling them that it's forbidden, coming up with restrictions and ways to enforce them, and bemoaning the ills of alcohol that they spent no time equipping them to handle it responsibly. You say 80%, I say it would be a miracle if the percentage is so low.
Contrast that with some European countries where the legal drinking age is more like 16. Teens younger than that might have a glass of wine at the dinner table, under the supervision of their parents. There is no mystique or taboo attached to it. It's just a drink, albeit one that needs to be handled correctly. Oddly enough, those countries don't have drunk-driving and alcohol abuse problems to nearly the same degree as the USA. Coincidence? I dunno...
I bet that there are no technical reasons why it takes 5 years or more to come up with an HTML standard. I bet that there are lots of political reasons for that. I bet that a small team of engineers could do a better job in less time than a bureaucratic committee.
I think you identified the problem right there.
Nothing is stopping them from innovating. They just can't legitimately call their independent innovations "HTML 5". That doesn't bother me. But what we get for that are ubiquitous yet proprietary things like Flash and all of the problems that come with them. I still think it'd be better to fix what's wrong with the processes we use to create open standards.
Terrible examples. I really don't think you appreciate the difference between open standards and proprietary "standards". That, or you understand it perfectly well but find it inconvenient for your argument, PR-style.
HTML5 is intended to be an open standard, so in this case you're making my point for me. There was a draft standard of HTML5 released January 2008. This too was produced openly. A vendor who produces something based on this draft standard is using the same specifications that are available to all other vendors. The same will be the case with the finalized standard.
That has not been the case with the proprietary draft-N implementations. Each vendor has their own version of draft-N. It's very similar to Microsoft's practice of embrace-and-extend. Interoperability with another vendor's implementation is not guaranteed. If you can't get Vendor X's equipment to operate with Vendor Y's equipment, or suffer reduced performance, neither vendor will file that as a bug and fix it. Instead, both will tell you "we recommend you use our products for all your networking needs". You think this is just like HTML5, that you're really comparing an apple to an apple here?
Most of the beta software that Google has released for download has been open source (Chromium, for example). Open source is no good if you want to implement a proprietary standard. It's great when you want the world to see precisely how something was done so they can interoperate with your software or port it to other platforms. Google obviously understands the value of this. That again serves to reinforce my point.
This is just another example of a phony debate tactic. If there's not a term for this, there should be. The procedure goes like this:
Betamax vs. VHS, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, now Wi-Fi draft N versus finalized standard draft N.
Open standards are a good thing. They avoid these kinds of problems. They promote interoperability. They also force vendors to compete on the merits of their implementations of those standards instead of competing on the basis of who is better at customer lock-in. It also lessens but does not remove the competition of who is the best at marketing.
If you care about assigning blame, it lies squarely on the people who purchased draft-N hardware. Whether they realized it or not, they were using their wallets to vote for this behavior. Those purchasing decisions reward this kind of behavior and make it profitable. Give companies the choice of agreeing on a standard or making no sales and they will agree on a standard every time.
For the record, that isn't my blog. And I only agree with 75% of the blog author's opinions.
But let me please get this straight: according to you, anyone who disapproves of socialism is incapable of humor? Or anyone who dislikes Obama is undeserving of positive feedback from this group?
There's one thing that blogger is damn straight about. Things are not quite what they seem and we are being lied to. I can tolerate all kinds of differences in belief so long as there is the common ground of recognizing that. I don't like Obama either but it's not personal. No man who really has your best interests at heart needs a multimillion dollar campaign to convince you of that. That's the case with Obama and whoever else has any real chance at winning a presidential election. It really does not matter who is in office. It's about who has the money and power to put them there. In that sense they're all the same to me. None of them are going to do anything that is too contrary to the interests of their benefactors. That's going to be the case so long as we have the two-party duopoly.
Strangely enough, your sig link sucks any humor out of your triumphant 'FP!'. I'm surprised you didn't try to get the monkeys to start tea-bagging in the Name of Freedom. You could probably get them to go 'oo-oo-oo' if you presented them with an autographed copy of Sarah Palin's 'book'.
Go ahead, mod me as -1 Troll. Just make sure you mod parent as well.
I for one have no problem separating the man's political views from the humor in his post. He's entitled to them, and a link in a sig that I'd have to decide to follow does not constitute a case of him shoving those views down anyone's throat. Sorry but targeting him for that is worse than anything he could write in a blog. I actually view it as a tiny microcosm of how religious wars get started.
For what it's worth, I don't usually visit links in sigs. There are so many of them and I'd rather just read the comments. However, your comment piqued my curiosity and caused me to visit his blog. I think you gave him some free publicity.
I think in most cases it's probably due to some deep-rooted insecurity; however you can't ignore the fact that some people are just dicks and enjoy arguing for the sake of it and pissing people off.
I agree, except I will add one thing. It's something I may not ever be able to prove but I definitely know it to be true. Some people do enjoy being dicks and do enjoy arguing for the hell of it just to piss people off. However, they were not born that way. If you want rigorous mathematical proof of that, I cannot give it to you. You'll have to look within for that and see for yourself that you were born a certain way, and all of your life a wide variety of negative influences wanted you to be another, inferior way. But whether you can personally accept that or not, I know deep down that this is the absolute truth.
Someone used this sort of bully behavior on them, probably at a young age. Being on the receiving end of it left them with an either-or choice: "I do this to others or I have this done to me." With this kind of thinking, it's dominate or be dominated, agitate others or be agitated by them. Growing up in a world like this robbed them of the realization that you can effectively deal with a bully and put him in his place without becoming like him. When people get broken like this, they come to think it's a normal, inevitable part of life. In fact it's none of those things; it's a systemic, societal lack of understanding.
Why would interstellar civilization be much different?
They could evolve from creatures like us; the "negative" traits of ours that you describe are a byproduct of us being highly expansionist as a species. Highly successful.
For two reasons really. Note that I restricted my commentary to aliens who are benevolent. No offense is intended, but that's one of those little details that was there for a reason. Only benevolent/peaceful aliens would refuse to contact us because of our barbarism. Aliens who are malevolent have no reason not to just land here and take over the planet with superior weaponry. In fact that would be quite consistent with an expansionist policy. Since that has not happened, it's safe to assume that any intelligent extraterrestrial life that a) knows we exist and b) is able to travel here, is unwilling to contact us because of how we are.
My second reason is also simple. To cross distances measured in light-years, they would either need to be able to travel faster than light or they'd need to be able to fold space (that may be redundant, since folding space could be viewed as a method of FTL travel). Beings who can do that would need a free or very cheap source of infinite or nearly infinite energy. Wars tend to be about resources of one kind or another, though usually other justifications are cited for propaganda reasons. Such beings would have a whole galaxy of planets they can access and all the resources that come with them. They'd have advanced technology and infinite or nearly infinite energy sources. Beings like this wouldn't have very much to fight each other about.
I suppose they could have evolved from creatures like us, but if so, they were creatures like us in their dim past. Perhaps they came to realize that instincts which equip you for survival in the brutal world of "caveman days" are counterproductive for highly advanced civilization. Such instincts include but are not limited to tribalism and the "us against them" thinking that goes with it.
Like us, I'd imagine that they can learn to act in ways that are other than what their instincts would have them do, ways that inherently lead to a society marked by harmony and loving-kindness. Ways that are not based on fighting others for dominance over a limited gene pool in a deadly game of winner-take-all, with all the plotting and planning and manipulation that goes along with it.
Our modern models of statecraft are like this. I will describe in these terms the only advance that has taken place: what the kings of old did by openly threatening with the sword, the rulers of today accomplish covertly with propaganda and disinformation. Still the same job gets done, which is that when the State wants something from you, the State gets it. The State perfers that you do so willingly because you want to be a good patriotic citizen who knows his role, but for the few who won't conform to that, the State is authorized to use force or the threat of force.
For an advanced interstellar civilization, the real trick is to produce a culture where the more enlightened view is the norm, one that would view anything else as a rare aberration. The other real trick is to know yourself so well that you can evaluate the contents of your own mind and understand that this idea comes from an instinct, while that idea comes from trauma you experienced long ago, and this other idea comes from sound reason. Humans can learn to do that, though few ever try. With that power comes the ability to be your own person, to reject the influences that lead to negativity and disharmony because you know what they are and don't find them tempting. Why wouldn't an advanced, benevolent race of beings have the same ability?
I'm not sure which country that you live in, but where I live, the press and the scientists aren't controlled by the government.
The press is a much more complex subject. So I'll talk just about the scientists. Many of them are doing "pure research" of the sort that is unlikely to produce a profit in the near future, if ever. This covers the LHC and all sorts of other things. Because their work isn't expected to be profitable, those scientists are not financially self-sufficient. Most (nearly all?) of them receive government grants in order to fund their work. Who receives those grants and what kind of work gets funded depends ultimately on the politics of the time and the mainstream scientific theories of the time. So, you can only deny the control that government has over scientific research if you discount the power of the purse, and I submit that doing so would be a mistake.
I'll give a recent example. In 2001, George W. Bush used his political influence as President to decide that the government will not fund research on stem cells if those stem cells are derived from frozen embryos. This was pure politics and occurred not because of scientific objections, but because people with pro-life views had moral objections to this method of research. There were already existing stem cell lines that had already been harvested; regarding these from the point of view of pro-lifers the damage had already been done, therefore Bush did allow scientists to work on these existing stem cells. Whether you agree with that decision or not, it amounts to the political micromanagement of scientific research enforced by the power of the purse. So yes, the government has a great deal of control and they can exercise that in a purely budgetary fashion without passing a single new law.
The most compelling evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, is that they have not attempted to contact us.
That reminds me of the movie Aliens.
Ripley: "You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage."
Of course I think what would really deter intelligent life from contacting us is the fact that we have had the capability of feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating every last man, woman, and child on the planet since the Industrial Age and, for various reasons, have not done so. We also kill our own species more than any other creature on the planet and treat each other like dehumanized cogs-in-machines for the sake of our economic models (see what Erich Fromm had to say about alienation). We not only experience lies, manipulation, and other forms of treachery from our leaders and authorities, we expect it and accept it as normal.
By the standards of a truly advanced interstellar civilization, we must be quite barbaric indeed. They would be wise to stay away from us, because if they are benevolent, then any interaction with us would likely be to their detriment.
As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?
Because to a lot of people on /. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.
You might have meant that to be facetious (or maybe you didn't) but I have often noted the same. For most non-trivial things, there are matters of taste, preference, or opinion about which extremely informed experts can legitimately disagree. Yet there is often a great desire to make a pissing contest of these things. Some people have a very strong need to be right, and it's not good enough for them that they are "right"; someone else must also be "wrong". I believe this is rooted in some kind of personal insecurity. That is, they derive their personal security from trying to dominate or feel superior to others, rather than viewing personal security as something that comes from within. You really nailed it, however: the tendency is marked by an inability to disagree with someone on a matter of taste/preference/opinion without also portraying that person as stupid.
I suppose that behavior has some "success", if you want to call it that, among people who are either insecure themselves (and thus intimidated by the idea that someone might think they are stupid) or unfamiliar with argumentation. When used on such people, it must achieve the desired result of a sense of superiority at least some of the time, or else it would not be so commonly practiced. However, for anyone not fitting that description, such techniques immediately and unmistakably betray the weakness of the position of anyone who uses them. They can even make a position weak that otherwise would be factually or technically correct. Usually, they also reveal various personal shortcomings. This makes the use of such techniques a sure way to humiliate oneself when dealing with anyone who can see through them.
and
You do know that you contradicted yourself there, right?
FYI, Google does not track me because nothing on my network loads any of their analytics tools or other tracking devices. That's how you deal with an entity that will track you whether or not you ever use their services. By behaving this way, Google themselves have invalidated the quid-pro-quo arguments that may have been in favor of their methods.
That is, the argument goes that Google is providing free services and all they want is some of your data, so therefore it is fair enough for them to have it in exchange for those free services. This argument falls apart the moment I receive a Google tracking cookie for visiting a non-Google site and, this is key, it happens whether or not I ever use any Google services. At such time, they become intrusive and, since I don't discriminate, this causes me to treat them like any other intrusive influence; that is, they get blocked.
"Every once in a while a box will show up at my door: "You need this. We found it at an awesome price. You will be billed via Google Finance"." I hope you are joking, because my creep-o-meter just went off the scale.
Another generation or two of advertising and propaganda, and people will be begging for this new feature. Once conditioned to it, they will be as disappointed by companies that don't offer it as they are today at the prospect of preparing their own meals or interpreting their own information. What amuses me (despite its minor inconvenience) is the way people on this site already try to portray privacy advocates as unreasonable, paranoid, and backwards. It's as though their message is, "you don't automatically welcome every marketing effort from corporate America with open arms? WTF is wrong with you?" Since when did siding with the marketers become the default position? Ever since some of them worked for Google? Does the name really do that much for you? If so that's some effective branding, but that's all it is.
That's particularly surprising on Slashdot, with a technical crowd who should be much more aware than the masses of how information can be gathered, used, and abused. You'd think that this crowd would more intuitively understand what you can do by cross-referencing bits of information from multiple sources, like what Google is in a position to do. You'd think that because of that, there would be more privacy advocates speaking out in discussions like this. But we have our favorites and they're precious to us, aren't they? Google can do no evil because they say so, now here, look at this shiny new feature and shut up. Right? Let's also sidestep the fact that anyone could potentially data-mine if it's alright for Google to do so. Privacy is in a sorry state right now, we need some strong protections for it, and marketing efforts like this personalized search should always be opt-in. Even if Google never does any evil to anyone, you have no reasonable expectation that everyone else will be so nice.
Yes, because pirates always follow regulation and install a AIS transmitters in their "large ocean-going craft"
For all of the same reasons that criminals who are willing to commit murder will always follow gun-control laws. Oh, wait...
Good points, most of them. However, I would assert that:
The information generated by YOUR actions and recorded by other parties is YOUR property about as much as the memories other people have of you doing something silly at a family get-together.
That depends on whether those people follow me around to events to which they are not invited in order to have those memories. If they don't, then it's like when Google gets my IP address and search terms and I'm fine with that. If they do, then it's like when Google gets thousands of non-Google sites to host its tracking tools so they can track me whether or not I ever use their services, and I'm not fine with that.
Still, when I say it's mine, I refer to the fact that this data would not exist if I did not actively create it. I also refer to the fact that the Googles of the world need my assistance to obtain it. I have to load their pages, accept their cookies, and run their scripts (and several other things) for them to have it. I am under no obligation to do those things, and when I refuse to, they don't get my data or don't get nearly as much. So the data originates with me and is under my control, and that is the sense in which it is mine.
You are really that worries about privacy?
Every time you google, you need to be logged out of all google services: includes blogger, blogspot, picassaweb, youtube, and all the others like analytics, adsense, gmail....
Clear all your cookies.
Then reboot your home cable/dsl modem or whatever to get a new IP.
Then go ahead and do you searches.
Clear all your cookies.
Then reboot you home cable/dsl modem or whatever to get a new IP.
Then it's safe to log back in to google services.
That should cover you for all googlespying that involves google analytics and tieing your search queries to you.
Oh, what's that? You aren't THAT worried?
I appreciate that taking an idea to a ridiculous extreme, noting that the extreme to which you took it is ridiculous, and then concluding that the idea is therefore inherently flawed is a common discussion tactic around here. It's a good way to support a predetermined conclusion. By "predetermined" I mean that you take a position first and then look for ways to justify it, rather than researching the issue and seeking to understand the different approaches that can be taken. In that fashion you seem to have already decided that anyone who enjoys privacy is some kind of paranoid lunatic or must otherwise be an unreasonable person. If you're willing to consider a more moderate approach than the facetious one you have outlined, I'll explain my setup.
It's standard practice for the logfiles of a Web server to record the IP address of visitors to that site. In Google's case, it's expected that they will also keep logs of search queries. I am willing to accept that when I use Google's search engine, they can (and will) associate the search terms I use with my (dynamic) IP address. If I were really worried about that, I would use Tor, but I'm not really worried about that. I consider it fair enough and regard it as something to be expected since I am directly submitting that data to Google.
What I disagree with is when Google wants to use various techniques to track my usage of non-Google sites. That is not data I directly submit to them, but rather, that they go out of their way to obtain. I understand why they do it; I just don't like it and don't care to participate in it. To that end, I take various technical measures to make sure that they do not obtain this data. This isn't specific to Google; those measures are designed to prevent anyone from performing this kind of data mining on me. My machine just doesn't volunteer that kind of information to anyone. The information is extraneous in the sense that I can request a URL and receive the contents of that URL from the server, whether or not I allow that server to know where else I've been. So I regard all remote servers as being on a need-to-know basis, and when it comes to my browsing habits, they don't need to know.
This is an appropriate response to the opt-out nature of this kind of marketing. I never asked to be tracked and never signed a document stating that I consent to it. Furthermore, even if I never use a single Google service, other sites that I do visit would still help Google Analytics track my browsing. For that reason, even the quid-pro-quo arguments (your data in exchange for free services) are specious because they will try to obtain my data with no regard for whether I actually use their services. Whether I want it or not, I am tracked by default until and unless I take measures against it. Therefore, those measures are fair game and I am well within my rights to implement them.
Note that none of my arguments depend on Google doing anything "evil" with my data. Whether they use it in a perfectly benign way or whether they abuse it in every possible way, my arguments above still hold. That's why portraying privacy advocates as paranoid lunatics misses the point, though it's a cute way to sway those who don't know better. The data gathering amounts to taking something tha
This part interested me. All things being equal, you'd expect your ISP's server would respond more quickly because it's fewer hops away. However, all things are not equal because of the nature of OpenDNS. Specifically, I would assume that OpenDNS has many more users so it resolves, and thus caches, many more domains than your local ISP's servers. It sounds like in your situation, the benefit this gives you outweighs any latency incurred by querying a remote DNS server. Of course, we also don't know whether your ISP is doing a good job of administering its servers and making sure they can handle their load, so what really interests me is taking the ISP's DNS out of the picture and comparing OpenDNS to a local server.
If it's practical for you, have you ever tried running your own caching nameserver on your own computer? Your own caching server could either refer requests to another nameserver, such as your ISP's or OpenDNS, or it could directly query the root DNS servers of the world (like what your ISP and OpenDNS are doing). Here, I refer to the latter configuration and it's what I use for my own LAN. If you have ever tried this, how did its performance compare to OpenDNS?
Yes, it might be useful for people whose ISP DNS server is slow. That didn't happen to me since my dialup days. Besides, now I simply run my own caching DNS server. It's not hard to set up at all.
I wonder about this myself. Google is a marketing company so you would generally expect them to always appeal to the widest audience possible. As valuable as DNS service is, it's also not something that average users care about or think about. Most users who are dissatisfied with their DNS performance would say "the Internet is slow today" and not "I am experiencing unusually high latency from my ISP's DNS server". This is just a guess but they seem to be targeting two broad categories of user:
Personally, I just run my own caching nameserver.
You basically asserted that you could not conceive of a situation in which it would be difficult to set up and maintain your own DNS server.
You weren't thinking very hard.
My exact words were: "Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?"
... or impressing you with my ability to play a guessing game is not among my priorities. You'll have to get over that, or failing that, you'll have to imply that I'm stupid for not proving my intellectual prowess to you (after all, the Earth revolves around you, right?). I guess I'm supposed to feel insulted and try to one-up you. I get it, though I don't think that you do.
I noted that my experience was not so difficult and asked him why his was. That's not the same as being unable to conceive of a situation in which difficulties could be encountered. I don't think you appreciate that there are multiple potential difficulties. I could come up with several of them; the trouble is that they'd be imaginary and may or may not reflect his actual experience. Rather than make a guessing game of it, I asked him about his specific situation. This bothers you?
I wasn't thinking very hard
You're capable of realizing that nothing I've said has insulted you in any way or otherwise justified your decision to be a dick about it. This doesn't bother me because it doesn't actually say anything about me. I consider it to be your problem, to be honest with you.
I appreciate that some people have a strong need for someone else to be wrong so they can feel right. The meaningless pissing contest you've tried to entice me into is just a way to serve that need. I realize that this can be difficult to grow out of, even if you can see that you do it. It provides what you might call a feeling of superiority, or a fake sense of worth for people who can't find the real thing within themselves. Understanding this as I do, I cannot in good conscience go along with it. Instead, I'm pointing it out on the slim chance that maybe you'll appreciate it.
Anyway, that's enough of this thread for me. The final word is all yours, if having it is significant to you.
Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?
You apparently don't dual-boot with Windows (e.g. for gaming), or if you do you don't care that Windows doesn't use your own personal DNS server. You also apparently don't have any other machines on your network.
Running your own DNS server on a non-trivial network is a relatively significant investment in time, equipment, or both. Why should my wife's laptop be unable to resolve sites while I'm rebooting or shut down for the night? Why should I have to maintain *two* DNS servers (one in Windows and one in Linux) if I want to dual-boot? Why should I have to set up a separate physical machine to run DNS (to avoid the multi-machine problem), which adds energy and maintenance costs?
The potential costs of your proposition are far greater than the benefits, especially when someone else (Google) is doing it all for free. And yet you think it's trivial.
Can you explain that discrepancy, please?
On second thought, don't bother - you obviously think "it's easy for me in my situation" is equivalent to "it's easy for everyone in every situation".
You are correct that I do not dual-boot. My machine just runs Linux all the time; there are no other operating systems installed on it. You are incorrect about it being the only machine on the network. There are several machines on this LAN and the others run Windows. Those Windows machines also use this DNS server. This network is behind a NAT router, so it was as simple as pointing the Windows machines at 192.168.x.x for their primary DNS. My Linux machine is up 24/7 barring the need to occasionally reboot to load a new kernel, but just in case my machine is not running, the Windows machines use the NAT router's IP address for the secondary DNS (the router proxies any DNS requests it receives to the ISP's DNS servers). In practice they don't ever have to use that, but if something should happen to my machine they will still have DNS service.
This was ridiculously easy for me to set up. Once configured, it has required zero maintainence, so I consider the several minutes to set it up to be a negligible cost, practically zero. Everyone using this network enjoys reliable, responsive DNS service and has done so for years now, which is a non-negligible benefit that we continuously receive. So let's see now, a near-zero several-minute cost and a significantly non-zero several-year/indefinite benefit. Yup, this passes any cost-benefit analysis that would apply.
You might have a setup that would make this difficult or infeasible in your situation. That doesn't mean it's universally a terrible idea for every person in all cases. Did you notice how my original post never once claimed that everyone should do this just because I do? Did you note that I asked the other guy to clarify instead of automatically adopting a condescending attitude towards him? That's because I never assumed that a solution that works well for me is going to be ideal for everyone else.
Now, do you care to lose the mock indignation and give me a real reason why you believe I have made a mistake here? If you're done telling me what I "obviously think" based on claims I never made, that is.
Personally I use MaraDNS. It's configured as a simple caching resolver that queries the root DNS servers. I installed it with my package manager, changed maybe two lines in a text configuration file, and added its startup script to my boot sequence. That's the end of my involvement with it. It just works. Any updates for it are handled automatically by the package manager (along with every other installed package) as part of my regular system maintainence and do not require any sort of manual intervention. Setting it up was maybe a ten minute job, and ever since then it's not something I ever have to think about or tinker with.
MaraDNS is not unusual in this regard; just about anything other than BIND is this easy to set up and BIND is not much more difficult either, at least not for a simple caching resolver. Incidentally, its adverse security history and the fact that it's overkill for my simple needs are my only reasons for not using BIND. Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?