What will that cell phone do for you within a few minutes of a building collapse? You could always call a couple of hours later when things die down and emergency communication equipment gets set up. You wouldn't be going anywhere anyway.
Well you could be losing blood, for example.
And if the cell network is dependent on the building standing (say because the nearby cell towers were on top of the building or some other collapsed building), you might not have that network available anyway due directly to the disaster or attack in question.
So we shouldn't care if our cell phone network will fail in emergencies for one reason because it might possibly fail for other reasons? That's not very sensible. It's like saying, "Why should I wear my seatbelt when my car doesn't even have airbags?"
The whole post sounds like you're searching for reasons for me to be wrong without having a real argument.
Also, they can gather information about consumer preferences and habits. They can then turn around and sell *that* information to marketers and advertisers.
Bitttorrent gets faster not because there is more traffic, but because there are more seeds - widely distributed across the net.
Yes, similar to how distributed mesh networks become more robust as you add more clients, not less so.
True - but utterly irrelevant because in the real world in a specific place - unlikely events are unlikely.
We're talking about how we design and build national infrastructure, so the likelihood of there being some problem somewhere in the nation becomes suddenly relevant.
We don't build systems to withstand an aggregate chance
And that's why we see so many catastrophic failures, because people like you don't understand proper risk management.
Sounds like you're a developer who's pouting because your IT department won't let you run amok.
As an IT pro, the cloud doesn't scare me. "The Cloud" just pushes the IT needs to different places. Sure, it might eliminate a few jobs here and there, but you're horribly misinformed if you think it removes the need for network engineers and support personnel. I've run into too many people who sign up for cloud services imagining that it will be an IT panacea, only to find that they now need someone to help them manage the cloud service.
The problem is that developers don't always think things through in the way that a good IT pro might. You throw your cloud application up on hosted solution because it was convenient, but did you think about security? Or did you just dump a bunch of confidential data on a poorly secured server? Did you consider networking topography and bandwidth requirements? Did you do a real cost/benefit analysis, or did you just pick a solution arbitrarily because you thought it was cool? Did you think about how you were going to keep your data backed up and redundantly accessible, or are you just relying on Amazon to never have an outage?
Some developers will think about everything they need to, but in my experience, even great developers sometimes make for poor IT professionals.
But the real question is, do they want to devote any corporate time to even dealing with this kind of thing. Basically they would have to have a whole new division added on to their company to handle IT management, and they'd have all the fun stuff that goes along with it.
Obviously you've never done this kind of thing before. Ford needs IT management no matter what. Even if they use Amazon for hosting and Gmail for email and whatever else, that decision first implies that you have someone who understands the benefits and drawbacks to hosting your own services vs. going with a hosted service. People who don't understand it think that the benefits/drawbacks are obvious, but that's only because they don't understand it.
Once you've made a decision, you need to choose a vendor. You need someone on your staff to manage the setup process to make sure the solution is meeting business needs. You'll need someone overseeing the vendor for as long as you use them, and you need someone investigating new solutions to know when a superior service is being offered by someone else. Then you need people to help roll out the solution to users, provide training and documentation, and provide desktop support.
A company that size needs dedicated IT resources and management no matter what. Some MBA might think, "Oh, you just outsource it," but unless you have a knowledgeable staff managing the outsourced services, it'll be a disaster. Especially so with something like AWS, where Amazon isn't really providing a deep level of support. AWS isn't exactly a point-and-click solution for the masses.
You have a vast misunderstanding of how the world works... Congestion isn't caused by bad routing, it's caused by too much traffic in too small an area
What part of "rethink the design of the cell phone network" didn't you understand? The point is that the current design can't do this kind of thing, but a very different design might be able to. For example, think about the difference between the designs of FTP and Bittorrent. One gets congested when you add too much traffic. The other gets faster.
Yes, taken as an average and across the whole country - unlikely events happen on a semi-regular basis.
Yes, exactly my point. Unlikely events are *extremely* common. What makes them "unlikely" is that you don't know which unlikely event will happen where at what time. Just as an example, I feel confident saying that there will another other big huge media-grabbing disaster in the next 3 years. I can't tell you which city it will be in. I can't tell you whether it will be a hurricane, a flood, a terrorist attack, an earthquake, or something else. I can't tell you which city it will be in. I can't tell you exactly when it will happen. But when you start aggregating all of the possibilities of "disasters that could happen" in "places they could happen" over a long enough timeline, it becomes more and more certain that something will happen somewhere.
Now I'm not saying we should go to excessive measures to protect ourselves from every unlikely event, but we should plan for the unlikely. If it's not worth the investment to build a robust phone network that can handle this kind of congestion, then lets just tell people, "Hey, when something bad happens, the cell phone network will probably go out." That's not ridiculous. We tell people not to try to use the elevator in cases of emergency. Or we could say, "No, our phone network should be robust and weather this kind of event." That makes sense too.
But it's silly to say, "Well let's just not bother planning for any kind of unlikely event because unlikely things don't happen." They happen all the time.
We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency.
That's not so clear. I've seen more and more people ditching their landline and using the cell phone for everything, including emergencies. In the coming years, cell phones may even gain in prominence in our telecommunications infrastructure.
What if a building collapses and you're stuck in the rubble. You still have your cell phone and can make a phone call. Do you want to be unable to call for help because too many people are making phone calls talking about the building collapse?
In the case of the Boston bombing, what if you saw something that was both important and time-sensitive, but couldn't call out?
I think the main reason the anser might not be "yes, it's ok" is that communication can become extremely important *particularly* when there's an emergency or crisis.
I think everyone understands this, even if not on a technical level. Anything has an upper limit, beyond which is overloads.
I think the main question in my mind is, what our we comfortable with as a failure of our infrastructure? Maybe we say, "We're ok with the cell phone network going out during an emergency, since those emergencies will be rare and the cost of making the network robust and redundant enough to handle the additional volume isn't worth being able to use your cell phone in an emergency." But then are we really ok with that? If we have a bombing in a major city and people can't really report what's going on because our telecommunications can't handle the strain, is that really alright?
There may be other options, of course. Maybe we want to rethink the design of the cell network to see if we can come up with something than handles the load better and reroutes in case of congestion. Or maybe we just want to figure out a way to prioritize certain traffic so "Important" calls go through while the rest fail. Those things are both easier said than done, but they're other ways to approach the problem.
The problem I see with these kinds of problems is that everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. They say, "Well why should we waste money building out the network to protect us from a problem that's unlikely to happen?" But unlikely things happen all the time, and when one of them causes a problem, they scream, "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE THIS COMING?" We did see this coming. We decided it wasn't cost-effective to protect ourselves. Pay more attention.
I agree. I hate Windows 8 as much as the next guy, but the simple truth is that the PC market was bound to lose some steam. For years, new generations of PCs offered substantial new features. You could do more and run things better. Your apps would run infuriatingly slow, and then you'd get a new PC and your apps would run "fast enough". You'd have a big clunky laptop that you'd trade in for a sleek, lightweight laptop with faster wireless and a webcam.
And then you find yourself with a sleek, fast, laptop that can run all of your apps "fast enough". It has fast wireless and a webcam. You generally don't even use the webcam, but that's how adequate the machine is: it has features that you rarely use, but are there if you need them.
And now you can trade in that laptop for one that will be about the same size and weight. It has a webcam that's higher resolution, but you can't tell the difference. It will also run your apps "fast enough", though slightly faster. I mean, the hardware itself has substantially more processing power, but there aren't new apps to take advantage of all that power. The last "killer app" was HD video, and most computers in the past several years can play a full 1080p stream.
So why buy a new thing when the old one does everything you need? Your disposable dollars that you use to buy hot new things are probably going to buy a new smaller lighter tablet or smartphone.
The biggest failing of x509 is the CA system lacking a facility to limit scope of particular CAs leading to implementations shipping with a default set of free-for-all CA certificates.
I think the single biggest failing is that it uses centralized CAs which means expensive certs, which means people don't use the encryption except for specialized uses.
Life is full of stress, poor sleep and bad diet.
Tests are better because of those things, not worse.
In my working life, I've never had to deal with an evaluation remotely similar to the SATs. Granted, if you have a job with a bunch of certifications and such, you might need to do some similar testing, but those certifications are also generally very poor metrics for determining competence.
do these now actually exist in feasible, makes sense range that you can actually buy?
Total price, maybe not. I've heard of people getting a Sonnet Thunderbolt expansion enclosure, adding a video card that's supported by OSX, and running games. Supposedly it works, but you're talking about hundreds of dollars for the enclosure itself, so it's arguably a better value to just buy a dedicated gaming rig.
It seems to me that it holds a lot of potential. You could theoretically have a very lightweight portable netbook/tablet with a docking station which not only provides additional ports but additional computational power.
But maybe it just appeals to me, and there's not a mass market. I don't like having to keep documents and applications in sync across a bunch of different devices, and I still don't really like trusting "the cloud" to keep it all in sync. So I really like the idea of having a 7" tablet that I can take anywhere, but being able to dock it at home and use it as a full desktop and gaming rig with all the peripherals, without maintaining a separate computer, OS, and profile. We're not there yet, but I think that's where we're going.
Tests aren't always great metrics either. Some people are good at tests, while others are bad. Tests are too easily swayed by stress level, recent sleep patterns, and diet.
Personally, I think teacher should get to know their students and talk to them rather than relying solely on metrics, but I understand that we don't think education is important enough to spend all that time on it.
These days, it should be disconcerting whenever people start collecting data which can easily be misused, especially when the valid uses for that data is limited. The reason you should be concerned is that data will almost certainly be used for something, most likely by someone who doesn't really understand how to analyze the data.
We're a society obsessed with metrics. We've had a lot of success with science and automation and statistical analyses, and we've been primed to expect that numbers mean things. When you or I see an obvious trend on a line graph-- it doesn't matter how smart we are-- we think that trend is a sign of some real trend even before we know what the line graph represents. We assume that it's the result of some kind of controlled study by people smarter than us, and that their conclusions are probably correct.
So make no mistake: if schools start using this, there will be cases where a student gets into trouble for "not reading his book". There will be kids who will open their ebooks and flip through them at calculated rates, and there will be teachers who believe that means that they read the book. There will be news stories saying, "According to a scientific study, x% of students don't even complete their reading assignments," and that study may or may not be accurate. We won't know whether it's accurate, because we'll just trust the numbers presented by some reporter without understanding that it was derived from a questionable measurement.
Except that they aren't really the ones who take the hit when their risky behavior fails.
Right now, they're gambling with your money. If they win, they keep the profits. If they lose, government pays you off and the banker himself might lose his job. Getting rid of the FDIC would mean that they're still gambling with your money, and if they win they still keep the profits, but if they lose, they simply lose your money, and the banker himself still might lose his job.
My point was more that if you have to think a few levels deep to view it as "moral hazard", then it's not a classic example.
Beyond that, I would say that your description makes it sound less like the problem is "moral hazard" and more like the problem is that the negative consequences to risky behavior is too infrequent while the rewards are common.
What the FDIC does is give the banking class license to invest wildly, without their customers caring at all what their banks do. Classic moral hazard.
Well no, it's not a classic example of moral hazard. At least, not according to my (admittedly laymen's) understanding of the system. The people protected by the FDIC are not the same as the people taking wild risks. If a bank goes bankrupt due to poor investment, the bank and the bankers still suffer. The people who are engaging in the safe/responsible decision to put their money into a bank account are the ones who are rescued.
So you might still claim that this is "moral hazard", but it's not the classic example. The bank bailouts since 2008 are more of a "classic" example.
Well for one thing, you shouldn't trust your UPS quite that highly. Saying, "I have a UPS, so why not store important information in volatile RAM?" is a bit like saying, "Well I'm wearing a seatbelt, so why not drive drunk?"
Most people I've seen who say it's bad haven't even used it.
Care to cite some evidence?
I don't doubt that *many* of the people who say it's bad haven't used it, but I have already heard from many people who say it's bad and have used it. I've used it. It's bad.
Not that it's all bad. There have been many improvements, both under the hood and in the visible feature set. If they hadn't forced the Metro UI (or whatever they're calling it) on desktop users, it would be a good upgrade to Windows 7. However, the new UI is terrible. I've even used it on tablets, and it's not actually good for that either.
I mean, what exactly is she (hypothetically) claiming when she says "humans rode dinosaurs".
If you read the OP, "... she told me a story about how her grandfather, fifty years ago, dated footprints of a dinosaurs and a man that were right next to each other to be within the same epoch of history...The odd thing is that she's not religious, it's just what her archaeologist grandfather taught her."
But we don't all go making claims about easily verifiable facts, without exerting a minimum amount of effort to easily verify those facts. If you don't know, say you don't know.
Yes, but it's not quite that simple. You've never made a claim which turned out to be wrong? You've never told someone anything that you believed was true, had someone else point out was false, and then felt stupid?
Well those are just the things that you've accepted you were wrong about. It should make you wonder, what are the things that I feel sure about, which are not true, but which I have not yet accepted are false? Surely there are at least a couple of things. There's probably an urban legend that you've heard people repeat 30 times, and you've taken for granted, but if you looked it up on Snopes you'd find out it's false. There's probably some economic theory that you hold strongly to, in spite of quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. There are probably a couple facts which you're just in denial about. You can say, "No there aren't!" but that's what everyone says. And how many people are wrong about things? Everyone.
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What will that cell phone do for you within a few minutes of a building collapse? You could always call a couple of hours later when things die down and emergency communication equipment gets set up. You wouldn't be going anywhere anyway.
Well you could be losing blood, for example.
And if the cell network is dependent on the building standing (say because the nearby cell towers were on top of the building or some other collapsed building), you might not have that network available anyway due directly to the disaster or attack in question.
So we shouldn't care if our cell phone network will fail in emergencies for one reason because it might possibly fail for other reasons? That's not very sensible. It's like saying, "Why should I wear my seatbelt when my car doesn't even have airbags?"
The whole post sounds like you're searching for reasons for me to be wrong without having a real argument.
Also, they can gather information about consumer preferences and habits. They can then turn around and sell *that* information to marketers and advertisers.
I agree with you. That's the smarter move.
Bitttorrent gets faster not because there is more traffic, but because there are more seeds - widely distributed across the net.
Yes, similar to how distributed mesh networks become more robust as you add more clients, not less so.
True - but utterly irrelevant because in the real world in a specific place - unlikely events are unlikely.
We're talking about how we design and build national infrastructure, so the likelihood of there being some problem somewhere in the nation becomes suddenly relevant.
We don't build systems to withstand an aggregate chance
And that's why we see so many catastrophic failures, because people like you don't understand proper risk management.
What, are you 12 years old, or just terribly dim?
Sounds like you're a developer who's pouting because your IT department won't let you run amok.
As an IT pro, the cloud doesn't scare me. "The Cloud" just pushes the IT needs to different places. Sure, it might eliminate a few jobs here and there, but you're horribly misinformed if you think it removes the need for network engineers and support personnel. I've run into too many people who sign up for cloud services imagining that it will be an IT panacea, only to find that they now need someone to help them manage the cloud service.
The problem is that developers don't always think things through in the way that a good IT pro might. You throw your cloud application up on hosted solution because it was convenient, but did you think about security? Or did you just dump a bunch of confidential data on a poorly secured server? Did you consider networking topography and bandwidth requirements? Did you do a real cost/benefit analysis, or did you just pick a solution arbitrarily because you thought it was cool? Did you think about how you were going to keep your data backed up and redundantly accessible, or are you just relying on Amazon to never have an outage?
Some developers will think about everything they need to, but in my experience, even great developers sometimes make for poor IT professionals.
But the real question is, do they want to devote any corporate time to even dealing with this kind of thing. Basically they would have to have a whole new division added on to their company to handle IT management, and they'd have all the fun stuff that goes along with it.
Obviously you've never done this kind of thing before. Ford needs IT management no matter what. Even if they use Amazon for hosting and Gmail for email and whatever else, that decision first implies that you have someone who understands the benefits and drawbacks to hosting your own services vs. going with a hosted service. People who don't understand it think that the benefits/drawbacks are obvious, but that's only because they don't understand it.
Once you've made a decision, you need to choose a vendor. You need someone on your staff to manage the setup process to make sure the solution is meeting business needs. You'll need someone overseeing the vendor for as long as you use them, and you need someone investigating new solutions to know when a superior service is being offered by someone else. Then you need people to help roll out the solution to users, provide training and documentation, and provide desktop support.
A company that size needs dedicated IT resources and management no matter what. Some MBA might think, "Oh, you just outsource it," but unless you have a knowledgeable staff managing the outsourced services, it'll be a disaster. Especially so with something like AWS, where Amazon isn't really providing a deep level of support. AWS isn't exactly a point-and-click solution for the masses.
You have a vast misunderstanding of how the world works... Congestion isn't caused by bad routing, it's caused by too much traffic in too small an area
What part of "rethink the design of the cell phone network" didn't you understand? The point is that the current design can't do this kind of thing, but a very different design might be able to. For example, think about the difference between the designs of FTP and Bittorrent. One gets congested when you add too much traffic. The other gets faster.
Yes, taken as an average and across the whole country - unlikely events happen on a semi-regular basis.
Yes, exactly my point. Unlikely events are *extremely* common. What makes them "unlikely" is that you don't know which unlikely event will happen where at what time. Just as an example, I feel confident saying that there will another other big huge media-grabbing disaster in the next 3 years. I can't tell you which city it will be in. I can't tell you whether it will be a hurricane, a flood, a terrorist attack, an earthquake, or something else. I can't tell you which city it will be in. I can't tell you exactly when it will happen. But when you start aggregating all of the possibilities of "disasters that could happen" in "places they could happen" over a long enough timeline, it becomes more and more certain that something will happen somewhere.
Now I'm not saying we should go to excessive measures to protect ourselves from every unlikely event, but we should plan for the unlikely. If it's not worth the investment to build a robust phone network that can handle this kind of congestion, then lets just tell people, "Hey, when something bad happens, the cell phone network will probably go out." That's not ridiculous. We tell people not to try to use the elevator in cases of emergency. Or we could say, "No, our phone network should be robust and weather this kind of event." That makes sense too.
But it's silly to say, "Well let's just not bother planning for any kind of unlikely event because unlikely things don't happen." They happen all the time.
We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency.
That's not so clear. I've seen more and more people ditching their landline and using the cell phone for everything, including emergencies. In the coming years, cell phones may even gain in prominence in our telecommunications infrastructure.
What if a building collapses and you're stuck in the rubble. You still have your cell phone and can make a phone call. Do you want to be unable to call for help because too many people are making phone calls talking about the building collapse?
In the case of the Boston bombing, what if you saw something that was both important and time-sensitive, but couldn't call out?
I think the main reason the anser might not be "yes, it's ok" is that communication can become extremely important *particularly* when there's an emergency or crisis.
I think everyone understands this, even if not on a technical level. Anything has an upper limit, beyond which is overloads.
I think the main question in my mind is, what our we comfortable with as a failure of our infrastructure? Maybe we say, "We're ok with the cell phone network going out during an emergency, since those emergencies will be rare and the cost of making the network robust and redundant enough to handle the additional volume isn't worth being able to use your cell phone in an emergency." But then are we really ok with that? If we have a bombing in a major city and people can't really report what's going on because our telecommunications can't handle the strain, is that really alright?
There may be other options, of course. Maybe we want to rethink the design of the cell network to see if we can come up with something than handles the load better and reroutes in case of congestion. Or maybe we just want to figure out a way to prioritize certain traffic so "Important" calls go through while the rest fail. Those things are both easier said than done, but they're other ways to approach the problem.
The problem I see with these kinds of problems is that everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. They say, "Well why should we waste money building out the network to protect us from a problem that's unlikely to happen?" But unlikely things happen all the time, and when one of them causes a problem, they scream, "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE THIS COMING?" We did see this coming. We decided it wasn't cost-effective to protect ourselves. Pay more attention.
I agree. I hate Windows 8 as much as the next guy, but the simple truth is that the PC market was bound to lose some steam. For years, new generations of PCs offered substantial new features. You could do more and run things better. Your apps would run infuriatingly slow, and then you'd get a new PC and your apps would run "fast enough". You'd have a big clunky laptop that you'd trade in for a sleek, lightweight laptop with faster wireless and a webcam.
And then you find yourself with a sleek, fast, laptop that can run all of your apps "fast enough". It has fast wireless and a webcam. You generally don't even use the webcam, but that's how adequate the machine is: it has features that you rarely use, but are there if you need them.
And now you can trade in that laptop for one that will be about the same size and weight. It has a webcam that's higher resolution, but you can't tell the difference. It will also run your apps "fast enough", though slightly faster. I mean, the hardware itself has substantially more processing power, but there aren't new apps to take advantage of all that power. The last "killer app" was HD video, and most computers in the past several years can play a full 1080p stream.
So why buy a new thing when the old one does everything you need? Your disposable dollars that you use to buy hot new things are probably going to buy a new smaller lighter tablet or smartphone.
The biggest failing of x509 is the CA system lacking a facility to limit scope of particular CAs leading to implementations shipping with a default set of free-for-all CA certificates.
I think the single biggest failing is that it uses centralized CAs which means expensive certs, which means people don't use the encryption except for specialized uses.
If professors need that kind of protection, then something else is very wrong.
Life is full of stress, poor sleep and bad diet. Tests are better because of those things, not worse.
In my working life, I've never had to deal with an evaluation remotely similar to the SATs. Granted, if you have a job with a bunch of certifications and such, you might need to do some similar testing, but those certifications are also generally very poor metrics for determining competence.
do these now actually exist in feasible, makes sense range that you can actually buy?
Total price, maybe not. I've heard of people getting a Sonnet Thunderbolt expansion enclosure, adding a video card that's supported by OSX, and running games. Supposedly it works, but you're talking about hundreds of dollars for the enclosure itself, so it's arguably a better value to just buy a dedicated gaming rig.
It seems to me that it holds a lot of potential. You could theoretically have a very lightweight portable netbook/tablet with a docking station which not only provides additional ports but additional computational power.
But maybe it just appeals to me, and there's not a mass market. I don't like having to keep documents and applications in sync across a bunch of different devices, and I still don't really like trusting "the cloud" to keep it all in sync. So I really like the idea of having a 7" tablet that I can take anywhere, but being able to dock it at home and use it as a full desktop and gaming rig with all the peripherals, without maintaining a separate computer, OS, and profile. We're not there yet, but I think that's where we're going.
Tests aren't always great metrics either. Some people are good at tests, while others are bad. Tests are too easily swayed by stress level, recent sleep patterns, and diet.
Personally, I think teacher should get to know their students and talk to them rather than relying solely on metrics, but I understand that we don't think education is important enough to spend all that time on it.
These days, it should be disconcerting whenever people start collecting data which can easily be misused, especially when the valid uses for that data is limited. The reason you should be concerned is that data will almost certainly be used for something, most likely by someone who doesn't really understand how to analyze the data.
We're a society obsessed with metrics. We've had a lot of success with science and automation and statistical analyses, and we've been primed to expect that numbers mean things. When you or I see an obvious trend on a line graph-- it doesn't matter how smart we are-- we think that trend is a sign of some real trend even before we know what the line graph represents. We assume that it's the result of some kind of controlled study by people smarter than us, and that their conclusions are probably correct.
So make no mistake: if schools start using this, there will be cases where a student gets into trouble for "not reading his book". There will be kids who will open their ebooks and flip through them at calculated rates, and there will be teachers who believe that means that they read the book. There will be news stories saying, "According to a scientific study, x% of students don't even complete their reading assignments," and that study may or may not be accurate. We won't know whether it's accurate, because we'll just trust the numbers presented by some reporter without understanding that it was derived from a questionable measurement.
Also external graphic cards.
Except that they aren't really the ones who take the hit when their risky behavior fails.
Right now, they're gambling with your money. If they win, they keep the profits. If they lose, government pays you off and the banker himself might lose his job. Getting rid of the FDIC would mean that they're still gambling with your money, and if they win they still keep the profits, but if they lose, they simply lose your money, and the banker himself still might lose his job.
My point was more that if you have to think a few levels deep to view it as "moral hazard", then it's not a classic example.
Beyond that, I would say that your description makes it sound less like the problem is "moral hazard" and more like the problem is that the negative consequences to risky behavior is too infrequent while the rewards are common.
And some people would like a free pony.
What the FDIC does is give the banking class license to invest wildly, without their customers caring at all what their banks do. Classic moral hazard.
Well no, it's not a classic example of moral hazard. At least, not according to my (admittedly laymen's) understanding of the system. The people protected by the FDIC are not the same as the people taking wild risks. If a bank goes bankrupt due to poor investment, the bank and the bankers still suffer. The people who are engaging in the safe/responsible decision to put their money into a bank account are the ones who are rescued.
So you might still claim that this is "moral hazard", but it's not the classic example. The bank bailouts since 2008 are more of a "classic" example.
Well for one thing, you shouldn't trust your UPS quite that highly. Saying, "I have a UPS, so why not store important information in volatile RAM?" is a bit like saying, "Well I'm wearing a seatbelt, so why not drive drunk?"
Most people I've seen who say it's bad haven't even used it.
Care to cite some evidence?
I don't doubt that *many* of the people who say it's bad haven't used it, but I have already heard from many people who say it's bad and have used it. I've used it. It's bad.
Not that it's all bad. There have been many improvements, both under the hood and in the visible feature set. If they hadn't forced the Metro UI (or whatever they're calling it) on desktop users, it would be a good upgrade to Windows 7. However, the new UI is terrible. I've even used it on tablets, and it's not actually good for that either.
Outlook is garbage unless you're talking to an Exchange server. It barely supports IMAP.
True enough, but Exchange is hardly rare.
I mean, what exactly is she (hypothetically) claiming when she says "humans rode dinosaurs".
If you read the OP, "... she told me a story about how her grandfather, fifty years ago, dated footprints of a dinosaurs and a man that were right next to each other to be within the same epoch of history...The odd thing is that she's not religious, it's just what her archaeologist grandfather taught her."
But we don't all go making claims about easily verifiable facts, without exerting a minimum amount of effort to easily verify those facts. If you don't know, say you don't know.
Yes, but it's not quite that simple. You've never made a claim which turned out to be wrong? You've never told someone anything that you believed was true, had someone else point out was false, and then felt stupid?
Well those are just the things that you've accepted you were wrong about. It should make you wonder, what are the things that I feel sure about, which are not true, but which I have not yet accepted are false? Surely there are at least a couple of things. There's probably an urban legend that you've heard people repeat 30 times, and you've taken for granted, but if you looked it up on Snopes you'd find out it's false. There's probably some economic theory that you hold strongly to, in spite of quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. There are probably a couple facts which you're just in denial about. You can say, "No there aren't!" but that's what everyone says. And how many people are wrong about things? Everyone.