I think of myself as a bit above average when it comes to computers and the Internet. I remember the first time I saw mosaic:)
In the early days of phishing, every now and then there would be a confusing but authentic looking email from one of my financial institution. Long after I started ignoring anything sent to ME from an institution, they stopped sending out stuff.
Now, if you are smart, ignore anything, log in and get your email messages from the system itself. Much safer that way. Yes, there is man in the middle, but much safer than clicking through someone else's proxy.
Even the intelligent can be confused or in a hurry and not paying too much attention.
Absolutely, I was merely pointing at the Constitution as it is the governing set of rules for the people who would like all the citizenry to be carrying IDs. Anything not specifically forbidden in the Constitution or in law based on it is a right that nobody can be denied.
There was a case (sorry no link) of some guy that figured out in Az or Nv if you do not register your car or get a driving license etc. there is no law to prevent you from driving where you want: that is to say the laws are regarding licensed vehicles and drivers and there is no law requiring either. Of course, he gets hassle, but he is right.
The US Constitution limits and balances government. Government limits the citizens. Other than that you are free to live your own set of morals; a right built into the Constitution.
The idea is to prevent government from limiting its citizens unduly. REAL ID or anything like it is an unconstitutional limitation of rights, both natural and Constitutionally guaranteed.
That is, until the Constitution is amended by those who would enslave an entire country.
If there were some basic concept of 'standard' web pages it might ruin the creativity of the Internet, yet every web designer can create a 'translation ready' web page of their material for accessability translation by some online service, maybe GoogleSightWeb ???
Something like the language translation systems.
Yes, all your content does not need to be in shiny little boxes AND when being translated to speech etc. it doesn't even have to be formatted pretty.
I'm reasonably certain that many web 2.0 applications can be made to format pages distinctly for just such a purpose. Then when tools are available if you don't give a damn about blind people... well, don't use those tools.
This is similar to the problem presented to web designers that have a need to support mobile browser users. The whole WAP website thing is very similar to what I'm thinking here.
Yes, if you use a website design tool that supports translations of your content it would be easy... er?
THIS is what the Internet is about. This is why information wants to be free.
Just 100 years ago, maybe less, you would have had to be someone very special to see this much information from one scientist, and most probably have to be vested in whatever answers or information can be gleaned from it.
Now, however, the Internet allows us ALL to enjoy the privilege of reading his works, notes, and seeing his drawings... for free, at will, at home.
If knowledge is power, this is some really powerful stuff. Forget listening to anyone tell you what he said, just look it up in HIS notes. I wonder how many college papers were written about Darwin and the fallout from this information to date? Wonder what future papers will look like?
The Internet, for all its down sides, is a great thing....
I worked on a contract for developing a fully autonomous guidance system for the SWORDS/TALON robot. Would you mind (if you can) detail a bit more at high level what 'fully autonomous' means in this instance... for the home viewers?
Seriously, this is a good thing but I think some of the 'planned' uses are a bit optimistic. I'm more than willing to be surprised though.
Anything with useful commercial life would need power like a forklift, and that is about as small as you can make a useful 'suit' for lifting that is self powered.
Who knows, maybe granny will walk again one day soon. What we do know is that she won't get to compete in the olympics with her new suit!
Won't somebody think of the illegal immigrants? This thing could put the day laborers out of work.
No car analogy yet... forklift was as close as I could get:)
Wow, even the fairly informed can make mistakes. Windows has a fine way of prioritizing what APs it will choose to connect to. Read a story not long ago about someone who thought he was on his AP, but found out a year after installing it while troubleshooting a connection issues, that he had been using his neighbors AP.
You are exactly right in your suspicions, get ready for darknet p2p programs to start popping up all around us. When Mr. Biden asks what a darknet is, I hope he is summarily ejected from public office. Subsequent to this law, the information on the internet made available to share via darknets will in turn make its way to those who would share materials that are illegal, so the end result is nearly zero. Some idiots will always get caught, but they are just as likely to get caught without this law.
Anyone with his position should have enough intelligence to seek out smart people and see what can be done sensibly. Of course, all his intelligence is in his wallet; which is (un)fortunately under his ass most of the time.
It really is time to get rid of big business lobbyists. Their damage to the US is unfathomably huge. Time for open lobbying, not dissimilar to having to post your lobbying requests on the legislator's wiki site for all to see.
We need a LOT more transparency in the influences on legislators. Clearly.
This legislation is being promoted without clear evidence that it is needed. Where is the supporting evidence to show that this legislation will stop what it is intended to stop? How will it stop those from posting to the Internet from countries where the material is not illegal? There is no evidence to support it. If there is, the law is not needed. They can use the evidence they already have to arrest those guilty of the supposed crimes. Fucking idiots.
What an asshat. Yes, your child can click on the 'download britany spears' link and get childporn. Those filenames are ALWAYS accurate. Damn, even the **AA were using wrong filenames to spoil P2P sharing.
You are absolutely correct.
"DNA is a proven law-enforcement tool." and this might be true, but it also remains true that standard policing is proven, as is forensics.
There is yet to be ANY evidence that infallible ID of every citizen leads to better security, better safety, or in fact anything better.
In the end, its ONLY use is control.
Criminals with no record, no arrests, and perhaps no citizenship fall outside the view of such a system creating yet another situation where only the innocent are inconvenienced.
REAL ID and biometric IDs have only one purpose, control of the citizenry. period. anytime. in. history.
I could spend days figuring out several ways to defeat any system of ID presented, and if I can you can be absolutely certain that criminals will. In fact they have much better resources than I do and would probably do a much better job. When you have networks of 'friends' to help you out on both coasts, and on other continents, it's easier to fake things etc.
When criminals want to do something the phrase "papers please" do not stop them. These ID schemes will in fact ONLY harm citizens and their rights to do as they constitutionally are allowed.
Hardware meets software at the corner of 'I didn't know it would do that' and 'how the fuck can a sensor cost that much'...
If they pulled the funding I'm willing to bet that there are political reasons.
Other than that, there is only so much you can get a given set of hardware pieces to do. If they overpromised and underdelivered on the hardware, no more dollars for you!
The trouble with robots is that they are not quite like jet planes. Once you commit on a new jet, you have to wait for it to be a complete failure in the field, and have already invested millions of dollars. When the investment is orders of magnitude less, it takes less of a reason to decide to pull funding.
If the govt. folk want a robot that just has to do things that can't be done in that form factor, or for the stated price, it's a game of get your money and get out of the contracting for a bit only to come back later for more contracts.
Perhaps the real reason it's being pulled is that it is designed for urban combat in non-sandy areas? Like say... oh... fucking main street in your home town?
If Iraq was just the proving ground for gen-1 of robocop, pulling funding is a way to push it underground and out of the public view untill they can pull it out of the robocop dispatch center and use it against the appropriately large starving/out of work demonstrators in a city near you.
No, no tin foil hat for me, I truly do believe that the neocons and the Bush administration are exactly that evil.
Re:What the hell were they thinking?
on
ISO Releases OOXML FAQ
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· Score: 4, Interesting
HUH?
What they were thinking was that someone offered a specification for standard and they saw the necessity of having a standard specification and they went ahead and approved it. I believe they are supposed to evaluate that 'standard' to ensure that it meets the specific and general requirements of such a standard before accepting it as a standard. Paying off the mortgage on the summer house is not one of the requirements, BTW.
Whatever PJ thinks is hardly relevant here. What any individual thinks about the new standard is irrelevant except to the extent that he needs to use it. Did you ever take any of those logic tests? Do well, did you?
What people think of the 'standard' is totally relevant. Simply blindly accepting something as the golden rule is ignorant, and this will (probably) lower the esteem of this standards body for a very long time. That is damaging to the purpose of standards, and part of the reason that there are not 47 international standards bodies.
Since OOXML is not the only specification out there, it behoves anyone with contrary feelings to promote their favorite standard rather than try to bring down OOXML. Okay, back to your logic problems. How do you promote your own favorite standard without verbally bashing this one that is trying to supplant the good value of your favorite standard?
Yes, I know that sounds like being negative, but you must remember that using OOXML as a design example of what standards SHOULD NOT BE is a valid method to promote the standard of your choice.
companies are issuing SDKs and don't tell you what license is actually compatible in a common sense, non-legalese way?
It seems only logical that this should fall in the 'system requirements' type category of the install documentation...
Sure, when you start your car there is no beeping alarm and a warning sign to use ONLY unleaded gas, but then they go to extra efforts to warn you at the gas fill spot, and make the neck of the gas fill tube so that only unleaded fuel and siphon hoses will fit.
This license thing is like letting you believe you can pour diesel fuel right on in the tank, no worries.
Where is the SMTP bill of rights and responsibilities?
Or how about a bill of rights and responsibilities for ISO downloading? HTML surfing?
When only one protocol/application is named, we are in for a long line of regulations (self imposed by ISPs or not) regarding every type of use for our Internet connections.
Car analogy? The speed limit is 75 if there is only one passenger, but 55 if there are three or more. 35mph if you have a child under the age of 12 in the vehicle. That is unless they are blood relatives, then the speed limit is 65 regardless of passenger count.
Rights and responsibilities have already been defined by the contract you sign with the ISP in the first place. They have gone to great effort to tell you what you can't do in that contract, and vaguely explained for what reasons your account might be canceled.
This new effort is an attempt to go back on that agreement, to modify it without pissing end user's off, and to get away with throttling in such a way as there is NO government oversight nor any other kind of oversight.
Sorry, sounds like I'm being bitchy, but if you don't push back on each little thing, it will be 'give an inch, they take a mile' and we'll end up with an Internet connection that is little more use than a dial up connection, and the price will continue to rise while service degrades.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, I just see the writing on the wall here.
This is about as good as I know to do. Document everything. Where I work, I politely make my senior (not plural) aware of something I see as a security risk and ask for direction after giving what I think are the two-three possible methods to cure the issue. If that direction is 'do nothing' or worse, I have at least documented it. I always do this with a follow up email, or as part of my bi-weekly report.
When I am running a tech project at work, I simply schedule resources in the project plan for security assessment and risk abatement. If these are cut from the resource budget of the project, it is documented on whose authority such was removed from the project.
Basically stated: COVER your ass, and those below you. When those internal emails get leaked onto the internets or wikileaks it will be you shown as having 'concerns' about the security practices, and others who are guilty of the massive security problems being allowed to propagate. That makes finding the next job much easier.
Additionally, all managers can find a few hours here and there within their department resources to do some security auditing and testing. Showing these results on your status reports documents proactive use of company resources. Additionally, if you can show that customer xyz just survived an attack because of something you did, you may end up being given more slack to accomplish your true and altruistic goals ( - that is sad state of affairs ) of providing secure products and services. Each time the company suffers a loss through security problems and documents the cost of recovery, you can show next time what security auditing would have saved them if they had taken actions earlier, such as the nice plan you hand them to peruse which would stop future such attacks.
Every time that I comment on a story about viruses and malware and security, I mention the fact that what is normally mentioned by antivirus vendors is junk used to scare up business.
The real danger lies elsewhere. Stories like this and the cyber-war story about the US and China are the ones that you need to follow and think about.
The chances that your company is already compromised by the NSA or some other country's spy agency/military is reasonably high, no matter what you do.
Okay, so you make cheeseburger boxes for several chain restaurants, who would want data from your system?
It looks a lot like the butterfly effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect in the fact that one small chance encounter or small piece of information can greatly affect the outcome of a particular chain of events. Your company makes cheeseburger boxes for a company whose CEO, in turn, is a friend of or associate of some political figure. This information is gleened from your system via email, and phishing email is used to get that political figure to open an email which is a dupe of a previous email sent, but contains an active-x payload... this in turn leads to more serious and useful information down the road... and viola! you have enough for a hack on the RNC mail server...
Something like that, just work out your own end goal and play 6 steps to Kevin Bacon to find out how to get there. Much is public information and can be used to nail the last link you need for planting the right spyware in the right place, unnoticed, undetected, unfettered. No need for millions of bots, just one well placed piece of code.
Best part is that it is enabled/started by the high-ranking user, one that is never spied on, so the malware is safely sitting there doing it's thing without interruption.
That is how spying works, a little bit at a time, patiently looking for a chink in the armor.
If you walk into the courtroom with a working demo of the product you are developing for the patent, ok, you win. If you have nothing to show for your patent other than paperwork from the patent office... sorry.
Yes, if you do not act fast, you can lose the patent to the public domain. Of course, if you truly have something that is innovative and non-obvious it will not readily be 'also invented' by someone else.
The patent system was created to deal with commerce and innovation of 500+ years ago. Do I need tell you about the contrast between then and now?
Technology based patents are useless in about 5 years; nearly worthless in 3. Anything longer than 7 years is gratuitous. Yes, I believe that there should be levels of patents issued. If your technology is truly innovative and paradigm shifting, ok, 21 years. It's not so if all you did was change the color (colour) or connector.
There no longer is a one size fits all schema. If you want a business process patent, I'm okay with that, but you only get 2 years from date of issue, after that it goes to public domain.
Oh, genetic patents... nach! not getting them. If you think your soybean seeds are better than nature has created, prove it by selling more without a patent. Absolutely no patents on anything that nature created: all you are doing is changing the color or connector. period. no. joking.
And to answer your point, if you are working on something and can show valid reason to have the patent longer, so it will be. If you have nothing, that is EXACTLY what you are leaving the courtroom with.
This is a perfect example of where the patent system is broken. It makes only logical common sense that the innovator here should be allowed to continue unfettered after paying a minimum penalty payment. By minimum, I mean $1 USD or something, and the patent holder forced to negotiate royalties via arbitration. If you have the patent and sit on it... tough, sucks to be you. If you wait more than 1 year after the common market sale of said product, you get nothing and the patent falls to public domain.
If you are found to be stifling innovation by using patents to block innovators... well, say good bye to ALL your patents in the next 7 years. At least any patents that look similar to the one in question. Say, all your hard drive patents.
Patents are meant to protect, not be used to bludgeon your competition into bankruptcy. If you misuse them... nach!, all your patents are belong to the public domain.
It's time that this stupid use of patents was brought to an end.
Sure, my suggestion has some issues, but every solution less than 100 pages long does. The idea is what I'm offering, not the fine details.
See my other post: I agree that free will allows you to choose the worst of available choices. My post here was to argue that the.5 second lag is not presented correctly in argument. There are many things that allow us to mitigate that lag, in sport, in business, and in survival. The skill that some use in doing so in sport is what draws fans. Remember, the batter and pitcher et al are under duress during the 1.2 seconds of a pitch. During that time the human brain makes decisions in an accelerated rate. Free will is to subject oneself to that duress, and then make the decisions necessary. Just as cornering a wooly mammoth for next week's dinners is a free will decision. After that, it's all about decisions, with a winner take all kind of outcome... if you can envision what I mean. We animals are built for this, human and others. It is not something specific to humans, nor is free will specific to humans. Choosing to survive any given situation is free will, be it sports, business, or killing to survive. What you say is true if you ignore the dilations of reality due to duress. Add those in and the game of baseball fits the profile I tried to explain.
This is decision making through trained thought processes. We hit the ball with some expectation of where the opponent will return the ball, or at least most professional tennis players do. Given that we have already predicted the likely return path of the ball, reacting to visual signals based on the other players body actions gives us quite a large lead time in terms of milliseconds in that process. By the time the other players racket hits the ball we are already headed toward the most likely direction of the return of the ball. You will see in pro games where a player totally fucks up that process and just lets the ball go. It is the high tension precision of play/guess/play/guess that makes sports the exciting thing that brings fans. The ability to mentally guess based on available knowledge where to be and when is what amazes us, though to the players it's as much reaction as it is a trained instinctual movement.
I write code, and some of it relies on the predictable processes of other code. That is how things work. We all use the best information we have to make decisions of free will. What was painful decision making process becomes trained reactive processes after time and practice. Some people seem to have a 'knack' for some things... they usually become professionals. This happens in every walk of life. Sales people are different than engineers and both are different from sports players. Each has a set of decision making processes that are honed to a certain group of tasks. There is a reason that sports players don't generally retire to become insurance sales people.
Free will is the ability to use available information to arrive at good outcomes of any decision. This, at it's most basic, is seen in survival situations. This, survival situations, is what I like to call failure-mode analysis. It works for code, it works for anything. Break it down to failure mode and see what happens, how each component reacts. In sports we see failure mode use repeatedly. Tennis is basically run that way the entire match. Each mistake is a failure. Each failure leads to one of two outcomes: further failure or success. This is survival mode.
In that mode, we have to use free will as simply repeating what we have done before leads to failure. We have to learn and use free will to assert that learning to gain success... unless you simply wish to surrender, and that is free will also.
I choose not to replace main bearing seals on my car's engine... I surrender. If I had to, I could learn how and do it, but I CHOOSE not to.
In most cases in life where there seems to be no free will, we simply have chosen to surrender or not learn what is needed to complete the task or defeat the puzzle.
500ms is a long time in some respects, yet it is a very short time. It has been scientifically proven that when adrenaline is pumping, our body clocks (sense of time) is sped up. That is, 500ms under physical duress seems like it was 3-4 seconds, giving our brains time to react faster than what we normally perceive.
The measurements of 500ms are common in vehicle safety parlance. Seldom does anyone speak of that 1/2 second lag under duress. In sports, it's all under duress. Predictive analysis of the current events gives us the ability to see and react faster than the 500ms being discussed.
Apologies now for not looking up references, just some rambling here.
For several years we have come to know that there are new 'discoveries' every day regarding the brain or human behavior. This has caused me some serious existential angst, to be honest.
Without belaboring the point, lets just name a few items that have been claimed. Google them for yourselves if you want more info: The gay gene, the sociopath gene(sort of), the cancer genes, the cure-ish for alzheimers, genes that are linked to just about any hot-topic-behavior that there is.
Now we find out that violent video games actually calm us down (mostly), and the ready availability of sexually explicit materials is associated with lower incidences of rape and violent sexual attacks.
Genetic discoveries to protect us from radiation, some advanced in regrowing limbs, growing meat and organs in petri dishes, and on to other esoteric things like the brain events that cause spiritual events in the person experiencing them, the god-gene so to speak, no explanation for ghosts yet, but we do have string theory and the higgs-bosen experiments, quantum computing research, and various other 'discoveries' that come dangerously close to explaining all that we have (until now) held in the realm of the unexplained and mysterious: things that god must be responsible for.
Now, we are gaining a much better insight in to how the brain works, or at least some aspects of it. Imprints of dangerous predators in the minds of babies, links from what we thought only to be animal behaviors to human behaviors.
Not to try to turn this story into a religious discussion, but it looks more and more like we are losing all the mystery, and with it the reason for having a god. Unless of course you wish to blame god for giving some people that genetic sequence that seems to be linked to them being predisposed to homosexuality? Perhaps god is also to blame for the genetic predisposition to autism or dwarfism?
I'm very glad to see that we are making exponential leaps of discovery into how our minds and brains work. Only with such information can we cure things that have brought us down. The longer that we keep the feeble alive, the more it costs us as a society, yet in doing so we learn how to turn their lives into productive ones, and in the long run help ourselves. Science, for all it's involvement with morality and politics will lead us to a place that is not so much unlike what Star Trek (original series) intended for us to understand. Not sure if that is a chicken and egg thing or not, but seems like self fulfilling prophecy really.
Free will is the end result of what we do with all the information that we have at hand and feel the need to use. There are those among us that give up free will to instead do whatever the church of our choosing wants us to do, despite what others might tell us is a better course of action.
Free will is in all animals, humans included. We all have reactive components to our thinking. A pro boxer will react differently to an attack whle walking the street at night than say your or I might. This is trained reactive thought process. We are born with some (so some scientists say) and we learn others. For instance: many people will simply reboot a Windows system that hangs or is running slow as we now have a trained reactive thought process for that action. Free will was used to do that, even though it is reactive. Free will with no trained reactive processes will investigate or surrender.
Free will: My dogs have it, and it is only through training that they learn to do something different than their free will tells them. The thought of pain vs. investigating the strength of this new fence is a process of free will, after some training, my dogs freely modify their behavior. Until I got the fence repaired, they followed free will. Now, they measure natural curiosity and free will against pain, and make a more informed decision.
All of us, animals and humans make informed decisions... shamefully
My friend, you have just explained why F/OSS is solid and useful software. It falls in the hobby category for many of the developers. For all the reasons you stated, that makes it's quality quite high:) thanks for that insight. Hope we can all remember it when explaining that F/OSS is good software, even when compared to high dollar stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I think of myself as a bit above average when it comes to computers and the Internet. I remember the first time I saw mosaic :)
In the early days of phishing, every now and then there would be a confusing but authentic looking email from one of my financial institution. Long after I started ignoring anything sent to ME from an institution, they stopped sending out stuff.
Now, if you are smart, ignore anything, log in and get your email messages from the system itself. Much safer that way. Yes, there is man in the middle, but much safer than clicking through someone else's proxy.
Even the intelligent can be confused or in a hurry and not paying too much attention.
Absolutely, I was merely pointing at the Constitution as it is the governing set of rules for the people who would like all the citizenry to be carrying IDs. Anything not specifically forbidden in the Constitution or in law based on it is a right that nobody can be denied.
There was a case (sorry no link) of some guy that figured out in Az or Nv if you do not register your car or get a driving license etc. there is no law to prevent you from driving where you want: that is to say the laws are regarding licensed vehicles and drivers and there is no law requiring either. Of course, he gets hassle, but he is right.
The US Constitution limits and balances government. Government limits the citizens. Other than that you are free to live your own set of morals; a right built into the Constitution.
The idea is to prevent government from limiting its citizens unduly. REAL ID or anything like it is an unconstitutional limitation of rights, both natural and Constitutionally guaranteed.
That is, until the Constitution is amended by those who would enslave an entire country.
Thank you.... sigh
If there were some basic concept of 'standard' web pages it might ruin the creativity of the Internet, yet every web designer can create a 'translation ready' web page of their material for accessability translation by some online service, maybe GoogleSightWeb ???
Something like the language translation systems.
Yes, all your content does not need to be in shiny little boxes AND when being translated to speech etc. it doesn't even have to be formatted pretty.
I'm reasonably certain that many web 2.0 applications can be made to format pages distinctly for just such a purpose. Then when tools are available if you don't give a damn about blind people... well, don't use those tools.
This is similar to the problem presented to web designers that have a need to support mobile browser users. The whole WAP website thing is very similar to what I'm thinking here.
Yes, if you use a website design tool that supports translations of your content it would be easy... er?
GoogleEarth we'll be able to find JSA making cube shaped spacecraft?
shhh, you're going to spoil a perfectly good, non-cynical post! damn it!
THIS is what the Internet is about. This is why information wants to be free.
Just 100 years ago, maybe less, you would have had to be someone very special to see this much information from one scientist, and most probably have to be vested in whatever answers or information can be gleaned from it.
Now, however, the Internet allows us ALL to enjoy the privilege of reading his works, notes, and seeing his drawings... for free, at will, at home.
If knowledge is power, this is some really powerful stuff. Forget listening to anyone tell you what he said, just look it up in HIS notes. I wonder how many college papers were written about Darwin and the fallout from this information to date? Wonder what future papers will look like?
The Internet, for all its down sides, is a great thing....
Seriously, this is a good thing but I think some of the 'planned' uses are a bit optimistic. I'm more than willing to be surprised though.
:)
Anything with useful commercial life would need power like a forklift, and that is about as small as you can make a useful 'suit' for lifting that is self powered.
Who knows, maybe granny will walk again one day soon. What we do know is that she won't get to compete in the olympics with her new suit!
Won't somebody think of the illegal immigrants? This thing could put the day laborers out of work.
No car analogy yet... forklift was as close as I could get
Wow, even the fairly informed can make mistakes. Windows has a fine way of prioritizing what APs it will choose to connect to. Read a story not long ago about someone who thought he was on his AP, but found out a year after installing it while troubleshooting a connection issues, that he had been using his neighbors AP.
So it goes...
You are exactly right in your suspicions, get ready for darknet p2p programs to start popping up all around us. When Mr. Biden asks what a darknet is, I hope he is summarily ejected from public office. Subsequent to this law, the information on the internet made available to share via darknets will in turn make its way to those who would share materials that are illegal, so the end result is nearly zero. Some idiots will always get caught, but they are just as likely to get caught without this law.
Anyone with his position should have enough intelligence to seek out smart people and see what can be done sensibly. Of course, all his intelligence is in his wallet; which is (un)fortunately under his ass most of the time.
It really is time to get rid of big business lobbyists. Their damage to the US is unfathomably huge. Time for open lobbying, not dissimilar to having to post your lobbying requests on the legislator's wiki site for all to see.
We need a LOT more transparency in the influences on legislators. Clearly.
This legislation is being promoted without clear evidence that it is needed. Where is the supporting evidence to show that this legislation will stop what it is intended to stop? How will it stop those from posting to the Internet from countries where the material is not illegal? There is no evidence to support it. If there is, the law is not needed. They can use the evidence they already have to arrest those guilty of the supposed crimes. Fucking idiots.
What an asshat. Yes, your child can click on the 'download britany spears' link and get childporn. Those filenames are ALWAYS accurate. Damn, even the **AA were using wrong filenames to spoil P2P sharing.
There is yet to be ANY evidence that infallible ID of every citizen leads to better security, better safety, or in fact anything better.
In the end, its ONLY use is control.
Criminals with no record, no arrests, and perhaps no citizenship fall outside the view of such a system creating yet another situation where only the innocent are inconvenienced.
REAL ID and biometric IDs have only one purpose, control of the citizenry. period. anytime. in. history.
I could spend days figuring out several ways to defeat any system of ID presented, and if I can you can be absolutely certain that criminals will. In fact they have much better resources than I do and would probably do a much better job. When you have networks of 'friends' to help you out on both coasts, and on other continents, it's easier to fake things etc.
When criminals want to do something the phrase "papers please" do not stop them. These ID schemes will in fact ONLY harm citizens and their rights to do as they constitutionally are allowed.
If spam gives you a pain in the balls, you are eating it wrong.
Hardware meets software at the corner of 'I didn't know it would do that' and 'how the fuck can a sensor cost that much' ...
If they pulled the funding I'm willing to bet that there are political reasons.
Other than that, there is only so much you can get a given set of hardware pieces to do. If they overpromised and underdelivered on the hardware, no more dollars for you!
The trouble with robots is that they are not quite like jet planes. Once you commit on a new jet, you have to wait for it to be a complete failure in the field, and have already invested millions of dollars. When the investment is orders of magnitude less, it takes less of a reason to decide to pull funding.
If the govt. folk want a robot that just has to do things that can't be done in that form factor, or for the stated price, it's a game of get your money and get out of the contracting for a bit only to come back later for more contracts.
Perhaps the real reason it's being pulled is that it is designed for urban combat in non-sandy areas? Like say... oh... fucking main street in your home town?
If Iraq was just the proving ground for gen-1 of robocop, pulling funding is a way to push it underground and out of the public view untill they can pull it out of the robocop dispatch center and use it against the appropriately large starving/out of work demonstrators in a city near you.
No, no tin foil hat for me, I truly do believe that the neocons and the Bush administration are exactly that evil.
What people think of the 'standard' is totally relevant. Simply blindly accepting something as the golden rule is ignorant, and this will (probably) lower the esteem of this standards body for a very long time. That is damaging to the purpose of standards, and part of the reason that there are not 47 international standards bodies. Since OOXML is not the only specification out there, it behoves anyone with contrary feelings to promote their favorite standard rather than try to bring down OOXML. Okay, back to your logic problems. How do you promote your own favorite standard without verbally bashing this one that is trying to supplant the good value of your favorite standard?
Yes, I know that sounds like being negative, but you must remember that using OOXML as a design example of what standards SHOULD NOT BE is a valid method to promote the standard of your choice.
companies are issuing SDKs and don't tell you what license is actually compatible in a common sense, non-legalese way?
:)
It seems only logical that this should fall in the 'system requirements' type category of the install documentation...
Sure, when you start your car there is no beeping alarm and a warning sign to use ONLY unleaded gas, but then they go to extra efforts to warn you at the gas fill spot, and make the neck of the gas fill tube so that only unleaded fuel and siphon hoses will fit.
This license thing is like letting you believe you can pour diesel fuel right on in the tank, no worries.
I like car analogies
Where is the SMTP bill of rights and responsibilities?
Or how about a bill of rights and responsibilities for ISO downloading? HTML surfing?
When only one protocol/application is named, we are in for a long line of regulations (self imposed by ISPs or not) regarding every type of use for our Internet connections.
Car analogy? The speed limit is 75 if there is only one passenger, but 55 if there are three or more. 35mph if you have a child under the age of 12 in the vehicle. That is unless they are blood relatives, then the speed limit is 65 regardless of passenger count.
Rights and responsibilities have already been defined by the contract you sign with the ISP in the first place. They have gone to great effort to tell you what you can't do in that contract, and vaguely explained for what reasons your account might be canceled.
This new effort is an attempt to go back on that agreement, to modify it without pissing end user's off, and to get away with throttling in such a way as there is NO government oversight nor any other kind of oversight.
Sorry, sounds like I'm being bitchy, but if you don't push back on each little thing, it will be 'give an inch, they take a mile' and we'll end up with an Internet connection that is little more use than a dial up connection, and the price will continue to rise while service degrades.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, I just see the writing on the wall here.
This is about as good as I know to do. Document everything. Where I work, I politely make my senior (not plural) aware of something I see as a security risk and ask for direction after giving what I think are the two-three possible methods to cure the issue. If that direction is 'do nothing' or worse, I have at least documented it. I always do this with a follow up email, or as part of my bi-weekly report.
When I am running a tech project at work, I simply schedule resources in the project plan for security assessment and risk abatement. If these are cut from the resource budget of the project, it is documented on whose authority such was removed from the project.
Basically stated: COVER your ass, and those below you. When those internal emails get leaked onto the internets or wikileaks it will be you shown as having 'concerns' about the security practices, and others who are guilty of the massive security problems being allowed to propagate. That makes finding the next job much easier.
Additionally, all managers can find a few hours here and there within their department resources to do some security auditing and testing. Showing these results on your status reports documents proactive use of company resources. Additionally, if you can show that customer xyz just survived an attack because of something you did, you may end up being given more slack to accomplish your true and altruistic goals ( - that is sad state of affairs ) of providing secure products and services. Each time the company suffers a loss through security problems and documents the cost of recovery, you can show next time what security auditing would have saved them if they had taken actions earlier, such as the nice plan you hand them to peruse which would stop future such attacks.
Every time that I comment on a story about viruses and malware and security, I mention the fact that what is normally mentioned by antivirus vendors is junk used to scare up business.
The real danger lies elsewhere. Stories like this and the cyber-war story about the US and China are the ones that you need to follow and think about.
The chances that your company is already compromised by the NSA or some other country's spy agency/military is reasonably high, no matter what you do.
Okay, so you make cheeseburger boxes for several chain restaurants, who would want data from your system?
It looks a lot like the butterfly effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect in the fact that one small chance encounter or small piece of information can greatly affect the outcome of a particular chain of events. Your company makes cheeseburger boxes for a company whose CEO, in turn, is a friend of or associate of some political figure. This information is gleened from your system via email, and phishing email is used to get that political figure to open an email which is a dupe of a previous email sent, but contains an active-x payload... this in turn leads to more serious and useful information down the road... and viola! you have enough for a hack on the RNC mail server...
Something like that, just work out your own end goal and play 6 steps to Kevin Bacon to find out how to get there. Much is public information and can be used to nail the last link you need for planting the right spyware in the right place, unnoticed, undetected, unfettered. No need for millions of bots, just one well placed piece of code.
Best part is that it is enabled/started by the high-ranking user, one that is never spied on, so the malware is safely sitting there doing it's thing without interruption.
That is how spying works, a little bit at a time, patiently looking for a chink in the armor.
If you walk into the courtroom with a working demo of the product you are developing for the patent, ok, you win. If you have nothing to show for your patent other than paperwork from the patent office... sorry.
Yes, if you do not act fast, you can lose the patent to the public domain. Of course, if you truly have something that is innovative and non-obvious it will not readily be 'also invented' by someone else.
The patent system was created to deal with commerce and innovation of 500+ years ago. Do I need tell you about the contrast between then and now?
Technology based patents are useless in about 5 years; nearly worthless in 3. Anything longer than 7 years is gratuitous. Yes, I believe that there should be levels of patents issued. If your technology is truly innovative and paradigm shifting, ok, 21 years. It's not so if all you did was change the color (colour) or connector.
There no longer is a one size fits all schema. If you want a business process patent, I'm okay with that, but you only get 2 years from date of issue, after that it goes to public domain.
Oh, genetic patents... nach! not getting them. If you think your soybean seeds are better than nature has created, prove it by selling more without a patent. Absolutely no patents on anything that nature created: all you are doing is changing the color or connector. period. no. joking.
And to answer your point, if you are working on something and can show valid reason to have the patent longer, so it will be. If you have nothing, that is EXACTLY what you are leaving the courtroom with.
Yes, and I am letting it fall into the public domain, thank you very much.
This is a perfect example of where the patent system is broken. It makes only logical common sense that the innovator here should be allowed to continue unfettered after paying a minimum penalty payment. By minimum, I mean $1 USD or something, and the patent holder forced to negotiate royalties via arbitration. If you have the patent and sit on it... tough, sucks to be you. If you wait more than 1 year after the common market sale of said product, you get nothing and the patent falls to public domain.
If you are found to be stifling innovation by using patents to block innovators... well, say good bye to ALL your patents in the next 7 years. At least any patents that look similar to the one in question. Say, all your hard drive patents.
Patents are meant to protect, not be used to bludgeon your competition into bankruptcy. If you misuse them... nach!, all your patents are belong to the public domain.
It's time that this stupid use of patents was brought to an end.
Sure, my suggestion has some issues, but every solution less than 100 pages long does. The idea is what I'm offering, not the fine details.
See my other post: I agree that free will allows you to choose the worst of available choices. My post here was to argue that the .5 second lag is not presented correctly in argument. There are many things that allow us to mitigate that lag, in sport, in business, and in survival. The skill that some use in doing so in sport is what draws fans. Remember, the batter and pitcher et al are under duress during the 1.2 seconds of a pitch. During that time the human brain makes decisions in an accelerated rate. Free will is to subject oneself to that duress, and then make the decisions necessary. Just as cornering a wooly mammoth for next week's dinners is a free will decision. After that, it's all about decisions, with a winner take all kind of outcome... if you can envision what I mean. We animals are built for this, human and others. It is not something specific to humans, nor is free will specific to humans. Choosing to survive any given situation is free will, be it sports, business, or killing to survive. What you say is true if you ignore the dilations of reality due to duress. Add those in and the game of baseball fits the profile I tried to explain.
This is decision making through trained thought processes. We hit the ball with some expectation of where the opponent will return the ball, or at least most professional tennis players do. Given that we have already predicted the likely return path of the ball, reacting to visual signals based on the other players body actions gives us quite a large lead time in terms of milliseconds in that process. By the time the other players racket hits the ball we are already headed toward the most likely direction of the return of the ball. You will see in pro games where a player totally fucks up that process and just lets the ball go. It is the high tension precision of play/guess/play/guess that makes sports the exciting thing that brings fans. The ability to mentally guess based on available knowledge where to be and when is what amazes us, though to the players it's as much reaction as it is a trained instinctual movement.
I write code, and some of it relies on the predictable processes of other code. That is how things work. We all use the best information we have to make decisions of free will. What was painful decision making process becomes trained reactive processes after time and practice. Some people seem to have a 'knack' for some things... they usually become professionals. This happens in every walk of life. Sales people are different than engineers and both are different from sports players. Each has a set of decision making processes that are honed to a certain group of tasks. There is a reason that sports players don't generally retire to become insurance sales people.
Free will is the ability to use available information to arrive at good outcomes of any decision. This, at it's most basic, is seen in survival situations. This, survival situations, is what I like to call failure-mode analysis. It works for code, it works for anything. Break it down to failure mode and see what happens, how each component reacts. In sports we see failure mode use repeatedly. Tennis is basically run that way the entire match. Each mistake is a failure. Each failure leads to one of two outcomes: further failure or success. This is survival mode.
In that mode, we have to use free will as simply repeating what we have done before leads to failure. We have to learn and use free will to assert that learning to gain success... unless you simply wish to surrender, and that is free will also.
I choose not to replace main bearing seals on my car's engine... I surrender. If I had to, I could learn how and do it, but I CHOOSE not to.
In most cases in life where there seems to be no free will, we simply have chosen to surrender or not learn what is needed to complete the task or defeat the puzzle.
500ms is a long time in some respects, yet it is a very short time. It has been scientifically proven that when adrenaline is pumping, our body clocks (sense of time) is sped up. That is, 500ms under physical duress seems like it was 3-4 seconds, giving our brains time to react faster than what we normally perceive.
The measurements of 500ms are common in vehicle safety parlance. Seldom does anyone speak of that 1/2 second lag under duress. In sports, it's all under duress. Predictive analysis of the current events gives us the ability to see and react faster than the 500ms being discussed.
Apologies now for not looking up references, just some rambling here.
For several years we have come to know that there are new 'discoveries' every day regarding the brain or human behavior. This has caused me some serious existential angst, to be honest.
Without belaboring the point, lets just name a few items that have been claimed. Google them for yourselves if you want more info: The gay gene, the sociopath gene(sort of), the cancer genes, the cure-ish for alzheimers, genes that are linked to just about any hot-topic-behavior that there is.
Now we find out that violent video games actually calm us down (mostly), and the ready availability of sexually explicit materials is associated with lower incidences of rape and violent sexual attacks.
Genetic discoveries to protect us from radiation, some advanced in regrowing limbs, growing meat and organs in petri dishes, and on to other esoteric things like the brain events that cause spiritual events in the person experiencing them, the god-gene so to speak, no explanation for ghosts yet, but we do have string theory and the higgs-bosen experiments, quantum computing research, and various other 'discoveries' that come dangerously close to explaining all that we have (until now) held in the realm of the unexplained and mysterious: things that god must be responsible for.
Now, we are gaining a much better insight in to how the brain works, or at least some aspects of it. Imprints of dangerous predators in the minds of babies, links from what we thought only to be animal behaviors to human behaviors.
Not to try to turn this story into a religious discussion, but it looks more and more like we are losing all the mystery, and with it the reason for having a god. Unless of course you wish to blame god for giving some people that genetic sequence that seems to be linked to them being predisposed to homosexuality? Perhaps god is also to blame for the genetic predisposition to autism or dwarfism?
I'm very glad to see that we are making exponential leaps of discovery into how our minds and brains work. Only with such information can we cure things that have brought us down. The longer that we keep the feeble alive, the more it costs us as a society, yet in doing so we learn how to turn their lives into productive ones, and in the long run help ourselves. Science, for all it's involvement with morality and politics will lead us to a place that is not so much unlike what Star Trek (original series) intended for us to understand. Not sure if that is a chicken and egg thing or not, but seems like self fulfilling prophecy really.
Free will is the end result of what we do with all the information that we have at hand and feel the need to use. There are those among us that give up free will to instead do whatever the church of our choosing wants us to do, despite what others might tell us is a better course of action.
Free will is in all animals, humans included. We all have reactive components to our thinking. A pro boxer will react differently to an attack whle walking the street at night than say your or I might. This is trained reactive thought process. We are born with some (so some scientists say) and we learn others. For instance: many people will simply reboot a Windows system that hangs or is running slow as we now have a trained reactive thought process for that action. Free will was used to do that, even though it is reactive. Free will with no trained reactive processes will investigate or surrender.
Free will: My dogs have it, and it is only through training that they learn to do something different than their free will tells them. The thought of pain vs. investigating the strength of this new fence is a process of free will, after some training, my dogs freely modify their behavior. Until I got the fence repaired, they followed free will. Now, they measure natural curiosity and free will against pain, and make a more informed decision.
All of us, animals and humans make informed decisions... shamefully
My friend, you have just explained why F/OSS is solid and useful software. It falls in the hobby category for many of the developers. For all the reasons you stated, that makes it's quality quite high :) thanks for that insight. Hope we can all remember it when explaining that F/OSS is good software, even when compared to high dollar stuff.