I live in Japan. We just bought a new Sony Bravia TV, and unlike the ones in the states, it contains, a hard drive, and the ability to serve as a DVR. Someone hacks into it, and can now use it to store what ever they want, even use it as part of the botnet. Think it's not a security risk now? There is a reason my Television is not connected to the internet, even though it could be connected to it.
Emphasis mine.
Let me be a "Devil's Advocate" here". If it's not hurting me, it's not really a security risk, right? Really more of an annoyance if I noticed my storage space reduced or somehow noticed a performance problem. Why are there millions of PC out there in botnets? Same reason, I suppose. "My PC has been a little slow lately, but I can still use it. I'll have my geek brother-in-law take a look at it some time if I think of it."
OK, so that attitude is horrifying to us geeks. But to your average PC user -- and perhaps even more so to your average TV watcher -- it's perfectly rational. If it's more of a hassle to prevent or fix it than it is to live with it, you live with it.
Oooh. I've got a car analogy. My wife busted the right rear-view mirror on her car backing out of the garage. (Not her fault, of course, it was dark. And she was tired.) She could get it fixed. I would on my car, it would annoy the hell out of me. Every time I went to check the mirror I'd notice that it was shattered and I have to replace it. But my wife is perfectly willing to accept the slight degradation of visibility instead of the hassle and cost of the repair. It probably raises the likelihood of an accident a little, but not so much that it bothers her.
Fifth time I've paid for a license to three of these movies.
If I'm going to respect copyright, tell me why I don't deserve to have these movies on my Nintendo DS, Netbook HDD, PS3, etc in whatever the latest resolution is. I've cumulatively shelled out hundreds of dollars (with inflation adjustments) for these three movies and yet I'm continually paying for them in the latest format.
You're not paying for the license 5 times. You're paying Lucas off to keep screwing with Star Wars, thus keeping him too busy to go and retroactively ruin "American Graffiti".
I'm allowed to have all sorts of medical conditions, but I have to pay extra for health insurance if I'm not actively working on the lifestyle-based conditions. It's the carrot/stick approach to motivating employees to bring down health care costs, but they're not doing it on the honor system anymore: you have to prove it.
Depression doesn't seem to fit in as a "lifestyle-based" condition. In addition, if you -- or your colleagues -- were depressed you could easily hide that from your doctor, and you just might if it cost enough. (It's not like a depressed person can't act happy for 15 minutes in front of a doctor or doesn't know the "right" answers in a screening questionnaire. Most physicians won't even screen if you aren't seeking treatment.) In that case at least, your employer's program might achieve the opposite of its intentions -- employees not getting treated for treatable conditions until they get really expensive.
I understand that driving is a privilege and therefore you give up certain rights when driving. In MA it's illegal to text and drive, don't know how they would actually enforce such a law. I cannot imagine a scenario where it would be illegal for a passenger in a vehicle to do anything with their phone they wanted to. It doesn't sound like this technology is going to differentiate between a driver and a passenger just if the vehicle is moving or not, sounds pretty lame to me!
I don't think technology can fix this it will only frustrate consumers forcing them to go to extra measures to make their devices behave as they want (jailbreaking, etc).
Did you even RTF. . . oh forget it. It's an app for your phone! If you passenger doesn't want it, he wouldn't install the app!
I refuse to let anyone tell me what to do, especially past-me. Who does that fucker think he was, making decisions for me? When he told our wife "I'll pick up groceries on the way home," did he have any idea how tired I would be after work? No, and he didn't care, because it's not him picking up the groceries, he is gone, he is only a shadow of the past, and I am the one who has to pick up the groceries. Well, fuck it. It's not like I'm hungry now. If future me gets hungry, he can get his own damn food. But knowing him, he'll blame me for not getting it for him now, the sanctimonious prick.
I think you're ignoring an idiomatic detail about the word 'sans'.
In all the usages I can think of, 'sans' refers to something that's a proper subset of something else. For example, "My cable television contract has all the channels sans HBO."
In the original post, it's not clear of what set "issue" is a member. That's jarring to the reader.
Therefore I think the way it was used was at least unpleasant and possibly also unidiomatic. I'd say that made it a bad word choice.
I'd say your explanation is sans basis in fact. The term sans means "without," not "except for." This is true in both the original French and in English. While these are similar, they are not identical.
Part of the problem with this is that any video game (or other) test that is reasonably quick is going to be reaction based. Surgery is not about quick reactions.
If one were to adopt the "Surgery Video Game Readiness Test," one would have to develop a "game" that specifically measures one's fitness for surgery, not one's ability to drive a simulated car with buttons or aim a simulated rifle or something else like that. In that respect, this is just a specific case of "you get what you test for". I would assume a specially-designed "game" would be required to give any confidence in its results, not an off-the-shelf program. I have no idea if this is practical or not.
As an aside, I talked to a surgeon who played the Wii surgery game. He said it was entertaining but in no way realistic.
You implement it by only giving ballots with a party's candidates to voters registered in that party. Yes, people can switch party to influence "that other lot," but you have to do it well in advance and that stops last minute impulse switching. It's not perfect, of course, but it's worked rather well on the whole for several generations.
It's kept voter turnout in general down for generations, too.
I don't think it perverts the process but I do think there's a difference between your stated scenarios and picking up the other ballot just for one vote. It's a bit of a seppuku move to basically throw away the rest of your primary ballot (presuming you would otherwise vote the other ballot) just to kick someone's Presidential bid in the balls. Our local politicians have a much larger impact on our day-to-day lives. I'd never consider trying to game the Presidential primary at the expense of those local primary votes. If that's what the voter wants to do, then more power to them. I just think it's a terrible price to pay.
If you live in a caucus state, you probably don't have to throw away your party candidate vote since caucuses are not usually held the same time as primaries for local office. Not even necessarily held at the same time for both parties. For that matter, a primary might not be either, with a number of states moving theirs up to have more (perceived?) influence in the outcome.
But more importantly for me, when I was a registered Republican, I did it more to vote in the local primaries anyway. The Republicans almost always had two or more candidates for any office. The Democrats, one or even zero! So I actually had greater impact on elections by voting the "other" party's primary. And our presidential caucus was almost always held after the race was decided, so the Presidential thing was moot most of the time anyway. I have since moved to a state with a much earlier caucus, so I'll have to plan things more carefully.
This post proved to me I have no friggin clue how you're system works. The idea of voters registering for a particular party... What's to stop the next Hitler from gaining control and quietly killing everyone registered to the wrong party?
Without either endorsing or condemning the US primary system, I offer the following explanation (within the limits of my own understanding and ability to express it):
The idea is that the primaries (and caucuses) themselves are supposed to be the vetting process to ensure that the parties nominate the best candidate for the general election. Who's "best"? Most qualified? Best looking? Most ideologically pure? Most morally upright? Best speaker? That's for the party to decide.
I cannot say whether this does or doesn't work better than any other system in averting the rise of the next Hitler. Hitler got elected, after all.
No, they should not. A primary is an election where the members of a political party decide among themselves who they want as their candidate in the General Election. Persons who aren't members of the party shouldn't be allowed to vote on such questions any more than they should be allowed to attend a party's caucus.
How would you implement such controls in practice? One can switch parties at will.
One of the other republican contenders could easily be behind this knowing full well it probably won't help palin but news of it may mobilize the saner parts of the republican party.
Okay, there's an easy cheap shot here. But instead I'll just say that primaries don't bring out the "sane" as much as they bring out the passionate. Caucuses even more so, since it takes considerably more effort to vote in a caucus than a state-run primary that's held at well-known times at well-known polling places.
I'm not sure if I can support this. I think it perverts the process.
I don't see anything particularly perverse about gaming primaries. I've been registered as a Republican in a heavily Republican district even though most of my political leanings have moved away from that party (or perhaps vice-versa). I have voted in primaries for the least electable Republican when I thought the Democrat I'd rather have in office had a chance in the general election. I've also voted for the least unpalatable Republican in elections that I thought would certainly go to that party. I don't feel bad about it, and I imagine that plenty of others do this too. And what of true "Independents"? Should they not have a voice in primaries even though they don't have a party to call their own?
Not that I don't understand your point, but all's fair in politics. Just ask the kid who voted for his opponent in the 6th grade class election to be a "good sport" . . . and lost by one vote.
And back in the ancient days of the web I used a website call webtender, according to the copyright line it's been around since 95 =)
I'm pretty sure I had a DOS app for this that not only came up with drinks you could mix with what you had on hand but also more general recipes, too. It sounded really good until I started to try to keep a kitchen inventory on my PC -- I abandoned that after about a week.
The religious extremists of the US generally turn to politics, because they see that they really can advance their cause through non-violent activism. Not always, but in general. The Islamic extremists elsewhere in the world realise that they havn't got a hope in hell* of achieving their desired aim through politics, so they go for violence instead.
*Or whatever the Islamic eqivilent is - I know they have one, I don't know it's name.
I doubt that the the fraction of Christians using violence to advance their goals is meaningfully different than the fraction of Muslims. Kind of like the difference between using SPF 50 vs SPF 100.
Also: who cares? If you don't like it, don't shop there.
For one thing, we could discuss that rather strange rationale. Banning fictional accounts of one particular type of illicit activity? We seem to like logic and consistency here, is there a way to explain Amazon's rationale for banning fictional incest but not fictional murder, e.g?
Great point. I remember the congregation's reaction when our pastor pointed out that the Bible would be rated NC-17 if accurately portrayed in a movie, and no movie studio would dare produce it not on religious grounds, but because the content would be so explicit.
Incest, rape, murder, mutilation of corpses, etc...it is all there.
C64 is for games only, ZX-Spectrum is for real programmers only;)
My C=64 software collection had far more productivity and non-game entertainment software than it had games. In fact, I had only one cartridge-based game (Pitfall 2).
Slashdot Mirror
Surely that should read, "without the user's permission".
I guess it depends on who owns your TV. Certainly sounds in this case like the author believes you've just licensed it.
I live in Japan. We just bought a new Sony Bravia TV, and unlike the ones in the states, it contains, a hard drive, and the ability to serve as a DVR. Someone hacks into it, and can now use it to store what ever they want, even use it as part of the botnet. Think it's not a security risk now? There is a reason my Television is not connected to the internet, even though it could be connected to it.
Emphasis mine.
Let me be a "Devil's Advocate" here". If it's not hurting me, it's not really a security risk, right? Really more of an annoyance if I noticed my storage space reduced or somehow noticed a performance problem. Why are there millions of PC out there in botnets? Same reason, I suppose. "My PC has been a little slow lately, but I can still use it. I'll have my geek brother-in-law take a look at it some time if I think of it."
OK, so that attitude is horrifying to us geeks. But to your average PC user -- and perhaps even more so to your average TV watcher -- it's perfectly rational. If it's more of a hassle to prevent or fix it than it is to live with it, you live with it.
Oooh. I've got a car analogy. My wife busted the right rear-view mirror on her car backing out of the garage. (Not her fault, of course, it was dark. And she was tired.) She could get it fixed. I would on my car, it would annoy the hell out of me. Every time I went to check the mirror I'd notice that it was shattered and I have to replace it. But my wife is perfectly willing to accept the slight degradation of visibility instead of the hassle and cost of the repair. It probably raises the likelihood of an accident a little, but not so much that it bothers her.
Fifth time I've paid for a license to three of these movies.
If I'm going to respect copyright, tell me why I don't deserve to have these movies on my Nintendo DS, Netbook HDD, PS3, etc in whatever the latest resolution is. I've cumulatively shelled out hundreds of dollars (with inflation adjustments) for these three movies and yet I'm continually paying for them in the latest format.
You're not paying for the license 5 times. You're paying Lucas off to keep screwing with Star Wars, thus keeping him too busy to go and retroactively ruin "American Graffiti".
I'm allowed to have all sorts of medical conditions, but I have to pay extra for health insurance if I'm not actively working on the lifestyle-based conditions. It's the carrot/stick approach to motivating employees to bring down health care costs, but they're not doing it on the honor system anymore: you have to prove it.
Depression doesn't seem to fit in as a "lifestyle-based" condition. In addition, if you -- or your colleagues -- were depressed you could easily hide that from your doctor, and you just might if it cost enough. (It's not like a depressed person can't act happy for 15 minutes in front of a doctor or doesn't know the "right" answers in a screening questionnaire. Most physicians won't even screen if you aren't seeking treatment.) In that case at least, your employer's program might achieve the opposite of its intentions -- employees not getting treated for treatable conditions until they get really expensive.
I understand that driving is a privilege and therefore you give up certain rights when driving. In MA it's illegal to text and drive, don't know how they would actually enforce such a law. I cannot imagine a scenario where it would be illegal for a passenger in a vehicle to do anything with their phone they wanted to. It doesn't sound like this technology is going to differentiate between a driver and a passenger just if the vehicle is moving or not, sounds pretty lame to me!
I don't think technology can fix this it will only frustrate consumers forcing them to go to extra measures to make their devices behave as they want (jailbreaking, etc).
Did you even RTF. . . oh forget it. It's an app for your phone! If you passenger doesn't want it, he wouldn't install the app!
I also have to submit to a blood test for nicotine, and get a note from my doctor saying I'm not suffering from depression.
Are there any other medical conditions you are forbidden from having?
I refuse to let anyone tell me what to do, especially past-me. Who does that fucker think he was, making decisions for me? When he told our wife "I'll pick up groceries on the way home," did he have any idea how tired I would be after work? No, and he didn't care, because it's not him picking up the groceries, he is gone, he is only a shadow of the past, and I am the one who has to pick up the groceries. Well, fuck it. It's not like I'm hungry now. If future me gets hungry, he can get his own damn food. But knowing him, he'll blame me for not getting it for him now, the sanctimonious prick.
Bastard ate my emergency donut, too.
It is your mother if the manufacturer programmed it to go off every day at 7.00, even if you don't have school/work.
Your alarm clock goes off because YOU instructed it to. Not because someone else is enforcing their habits and/or rules on you.
From TFA these devices/apps/programs are all voluntary. Well, I guess buying the 7:00AM alarm clock would be too, so nevermind.
I think you're ignoring an idiomatic detail about the word 'sans'.
In all the usages I can think of, 'sans' refers to something that's a proper subset of something else. For example, "My cable television contract has all the channels sans HBO."
In the original post, it's not clear of what set "issue" is a member. That's jarring to the reader.
Therefore I think the way it was used was at least unpleasant and possibly also unidiomatic. I'd say that made it a bad word choice.
I'd say your explanation is sans basis in fact. The term sans means "without," not "except for." This is true in both the original French and in English. While these are similar, they are not identical.
Part of the problem with this is that any video game (or other) test that is reasonably quick is going to be reaction based. Surgery is not about quick reactions.
If one were to adopt the "Surgery Video Game Readiness Test," one would have to develop a "game" that specifically measures one's fitness for surgery, not one's ability to drive a simulated car with buttons or aim a simulated rifle or something else like that. In that respect, this is just a specific case of "you get what you test for". I would assume a specially-designed "game" would be required to give any confidence in its results, not an off-the-shelf program. I have no idea if this is practical or not.
As an aside, I talked to a surgeon who played the Wii surgery game. He said it was entertaining but in no way realistic.
Lasers!
You implement it by only giving ballots with a party's candidates to voters registered in that party. Yes, people can switch party to influence "that other lot," but you have to do it well in advance and that stops last minute impulse switching. It's not perfect, of course, but it's worked rather well on the whole for several generations.
It's kept voter turnout in general down for generations, too.
I don't think it perverts the process but I do think there's a difference between your stated scenarios and picking up the other ballot just for one vote. It's a bit of a seppuku move to basically throw away the rest of your primary ballot (presuming you would otherwise vote the other ballot) just to kick someone's Presidential bid in the balls. Our local politicians have a much larger impact on our day-to-day lives. I'd never consider trying to game the Presidential primary at the expense of those local primary votes. If that's what the voter wants to do, then more power to them. I just think it's a terrible price to pay.
If you live in a caucus state, you probably don't have to throw away your party candidate vote since caucuses are not usually held the same time as primaries for local office. Not even necessarily held at the same time for both parties. For that matter, a primary might not be either, with a number of states moving theirs up to have more (perceived?) influence in the outcome.
But more importantly for me, when I was a registered Republican, I did it more to vote in the local primaries anyway. The Republicans almost always had two or more candidates for any office. The Democrats, one or even zero! So I actually had greater impact on elections by voting the "other" party's primary. And our presidential caucus was almost always held after the race was decided, so the Presidential thing was moot most of the time anyway. I have since moved to a state with a much earlier caucus, so I'll have to plan things more carefully.
This post proved to me I have no friggin clue how you're system works. The idea of voters registering for a particular party... What's to stop the next Hitler from gaining control and quietly killing everyone registered to the wrong party?
Without either endorsing or condemning the US primary system, I offer the following explanation (within the limits of my own understanding and ability to express it):
The idea is that the primaries (and caucuses) themselves are supposed to be the vetting process to ensure that the parties nominate the best candidate for the general election. Who's "best"? Most qualified? Best looking? Most ideologically pure? Most morally upright? Best speaker? That's for the party to decide.
I cannot say whether this does or doesn't work better than any other system in averting the rise of the next Hitler. Hitler got elected, after all.
No, they should not. A primary is an election where the members of a political party decide among themselves who they want as their candidate in the General Election. Persons who aren't members of the party shouldn't be allowed to vote on such questions any more than they should be allowed to attend a party's caucus.
How would you implement such controls in practice? One can switch parties at will.
One of the other republican contenders could easily be behind this knowing full well it probably won't help palin but news of it may mobilize the saner parts of the republican party.
Okay, there's an easy cheap shot here. But instead I'll just say that primaries don't bring out the "sane" as much as they bring out the passionate. Caucuses even more so, since it takes considerably more effort to vote in a caucus than a state-run primary that's held at well-known times at well-known polling places.
There will always be ideologues who value results over process. I would much rather improve the process so it's less inviting to game.
For instance, nonpartisan blanket primaries and instant runoff elections .
You could do both . . . game the system and work for reforming the system. If you game it right, it might even help bring about the reform you seek.
I'm not sure if I can support this. I think it perverts the process.
I don't see anything particularly perverse about gaming primaries. I've been registered as a Republican in a heavily Republican district even though most of my political leanings have moved away from that party (or perhaps vice-versa). I have voted in primaries for the least electable Republican when I thought the Democrat I'd rather have in office had a chance in the general election. I've also voted for the least unpalatable Republican in elections that I thought would certainly go to that party. I don't feel bad about it, and I imagine that plenty of others do this too. And what of true "Independents"? Should they not have a voice in primaries even though they don't have a party to call their own?
Not that I don't understand your point, but all's fair in politics. Just ask the kid who voted for his opponent in the 6th grade class election to be a "good sport" . . . and lost by one vote.
And back in the ancient days of the web I used a website call webtender, according to the copyright line it's been around since 95 =)
I'm pretty sure I had a DOS app for this that not only came up with drinks you could mix with what you had on hand but also more general recipes, too. It sounded really good until I started to try to keep a kitchen inventory on my PC -- I abandoned that after about a week.
I might want to buy an ebook fairly soon. Can anybody recommend a good ebook reader where this kind of crap isn't possible?
I'd like: no DRM, standard USB connector, possibility of uploading anything I want from USB, and open source firmware.
Nook reads PDFs, has micro USB and you can store these files locally on a micro SD card (at least in the Color version).
The religious extremists of the US generally turn to politics, because they see that they really can advance their cause through non-violent activism. Not always, but in general. The Islamic extremists elsewhere in the world realise that they havn't got a hope in hell* of achieving their desired aim through politics, so they go for violence instead. *Or whatever the Islamic eqivilent is - I know they have one, I don't know it's name.
I doubt that the the fraction of Christians using violence to advance their goals is meaningfully different than the fraction of Muslims. Kind of like the difference between using SPF 50 vs SPF 100.
Also: who cares? If you don't like it, don't shop there.
For one thing, we could discuss that rather strange rationale. Banning fictional accounts of one particular type of illicit activity? We seem to like logic and consistency here, is there a way to explain Amazon's rationale for banning fictional incest but not fictional murder, e.g?
Great point. I remember the congregation's reaction when our pastor pointed out that the Bible would be rated NC-17 if accurately portrayed in a movie, and no movie studio would dare produce it not on religious grounds, but because the content would be so explicit.
Incest, rape, murder, mutilation of corpses, etc...it is all there.
You forgot the coprophagia.
simulating everything?
That thought crossed my mind too and reminded me of this town containing a scale model of itself.
C64 is for games only, ZX-Spectrum is for real programmers only ;)
My C=64 software collection had far more productivity and non-game entertainment software than it had games. In fact, I had only one cartridge-based game (Pitfall 2).