No, it isn't. Fuck off you retarded pseudo-revolutionary.
I was to an ACTA demonstration today, and I am sick and tired and fucking pissed off at the juvenile idiots who turn every justified protest into an "against the system!" rally.
I'm happy with our government system. I am very unhappy with the people currently in it, but that's in a good part because we stupid idiots put them there. If you put your vote in for any of the major parties last election, no matter what your justification is, you are part of the problem. And no, if you think you need to vote party A because otherwise party B which is even worse, will rule, then you have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. People like you are who keep the system stable, despite all your revolutionary rhetorics.
It is very likely that the user is a large part of the problem
Yes, but in an entirely different way than you mean it. The user isn't the dumb fool who is responsible for the whole mess - he is the weak link being exploited, and we blast him with "dumb user" ridicule instead of helping him out. Any surprise that users don't trust the geeks who should know better anymore? The IT department is not exactly admired in most companies. How it treats the users is one big reason why.
There are still people who download a piece of software just based on an ad on a website (free anti virus or whatever) and install that on their machine.
Yes, and a) aside from telling them what a bunch of stupid fucks they are, we aren't helping them one bit making the right decision b) they should absolutely be able to do that in a perfect world. We have the technology - why isn't every fucking program you download not automatically put into a sandbox? Why are extended permissions, where requested, presented to the user in a way that reads "program wants bla bla tech stuff, tech stuff, tech stuff, incomprehensible, tech bla bla" instead of telling the user what he needs to know in a language he can understand?
We are way too obsessed with technical solutions. In a car analogy, we haven't built systems supporting the driver and making the car safer, we have invented HUD technology and now distract the user from the road with constant warning messages, confirmation screens and then tell him that the rising number of road accidents is a clear sign that most drivers suck.
I've just given a talk on this on tuesday. Technology is a sideshow in the full picture of this crap. Phishing, spam, etc. are not primary technological problems. Botnets are just the currently most effective technology underlying this crap. Before botnets, we had rooted servers pumping out spam by the millions. We made that more difficult, so spammers went to easier targets and began building botnets. If we push them ouf of there, they will find other ways. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
Your argument is a moral, not a legal one. Legally, scamming a millionaire out of $1000 is the same as scamming a beggar out of his life savings of the same amount.
Because hypertext doesn't lend itself well to fiction. There isn't really much that you can add to a story with hypertext, and while a branching storyline sounds interesting in theory, that's exactly what it is: An interesting idea. By now the idea has been explored and found to be lacking.
Hypertext is great for non-fiction text, and I hope that the "revolution in textbooks" that Apple is trying - and the momentum that this will create for competition, results in more utilization in that sphere. A history book would be excellent if it were heavily interlinked, because most historic events are heavily interdependent with other events, with persons, locations, etc. etc.
I'm still studying the details, but either by now or by the next iteration, you can strike the term "C&C" from your vocabulary.
Basically, if you used signed commands, the humans controlling the network can inject their commands anywhere and it'll simply spread through the network.
This comes as a surprise to anyone? Really? I attended conferences almost 10 years ago listening to and giving speeches about stuff like this. The technology is trivial, the only reason the bad guys haven't moved to the hardened networks stuff yet is because there simply was no need.
If you want to know what's next, I can dig out my old slides. A guy from Britain and I came up with several highly resistant network designs. I think our final one would remain largely intact if you took out 90% of its nodes.
Like all things in fighting spam and large-scale scams, eliminating the C&C servers was one step that was useful for a short span in time. There are still old botnets out there that you can take out with this approach, but the more advanced ones have left that window of opportunity now.
As long as our politicians refuse to tackle the fundamental problem - that of tiny crimes in massive quantities - we're stuck. Our legal system still works by "cases", adapted to a physical world where the crime has an easily enumerated set of victims, each of which having suffered considerable damage. The legal and political systems still don't understand both the tiny and massive scales they need to deal with in a virtual world. Scam 10 people out of $1000 each and you'll get a court case and jail time. Scam 1,000,000 people out of a cent each and nobody in law enforcement will care, even though the damage to society is the same.
They want to send encrypted content to a module that they sent me previously, encrypted so that it can be decrypted with a key that they send to said module?
Yeah, I can't imagine anything going wrong there...
It's not that easy. While there has been widespread protest, it's not like there were millions upon millions of people on the streets.
Germany has 99 members in the EU parliament. Germany has ~80 mio. people. That means every one of them represents almost a million people. At that size, stuff like "the opinion of the people who I represent" doesn't have much meaning.
Nevertheless, as far as politicians go, those in the EU parliament are largely the good guys. I still wouldn't buy a used car from them, but compared to the entirely undemocratic pseudo-aristocracy of the Commission, they're quite a lot better.
I don't "win" on/. - I don't care for winning an argument. And apparently we are having two entirely different arguments, too.
Notice that I don't even mention your laser alternative. I don't care. All I'm pointing out is that your "it's so dangerous, the sky is falling!" bullshit is exactly that - bullshit.
giyf. This is really old stuff, I'm not your google-secretary.
I'm not going to play your google-slave, that stuff is trivial to find, so giyf.
The elevator itself will be the equivalent of a plane crash. Ridiculous except for those directly involved.
The cable won't cause any kind of major damage. It is not heavy enough and not falling fast enough, and depending on where it snaps, more or less of it will go up into space instead of down towards earth. The rest will sail down softly, because its mass relative to its surface area is quite small. Parts higher up will likely burn up in the atmosphere.
The counterweight would drift off into space if anything happens.
The only dangerous part would be the orbital station. Depending on its size and composition it may not burn up entirely upon re-entry, and parts of it could hit the surface. The equivalent of a large satellite coming down. Might be fireworks wherever it hits, might scatter debris over a large area like the shuttle, but it will be very far from anything globally or catastrophic.
This move by the commission is not to get a critical review. The commission is the undemocratic EU-level force pushing ACTA forward. The (elected) parliament is the one that would rather not have ACTA and one of the few entities that put massive pressure on the secret negotiations and has repeatedly voiced its disgust with the secrecy of it all.
This move by the commission is an attempt to put pressure on the EU parliament. If the court says that ACTA does not conflict with EU laws, then the parliament will have a harder time to justify voting against ACTA.
By getting the court's opinion now, the commission is disarming the EU parliament, taking away one of their reasons to refuse.
Yes, nukes prevented these wars from spreading into the actual countries that were behind them. They kept the USA and China/USSR in peace - but not Korea or Vietnam.
I didn't say there was no effect. But the GP claimed this effect was valid for "all of us", and it clearly isn't.
If you ain't from the USA, you don't exist. How could you exist if Hollywood wasn't around to make a movie about you guys.
Then I'm just soooo glad that I'm German - Hollywood has made tons of movies about us. In fact, if that is your unit of measurement, we're probably more real than you.:-)
You need to count all the other wars as well. I listed five of 150-200. Granted, the largest five, but still only 2-3% of the total number of conflicts. I don't have numbers, and many of those wars were fairly small, but I'd say we will easily reach another 40 mio. - i.e. another WW2.
However, we have a steady decline of violence in human history. If you look at the list I linked above, and sort by percentage of the world population, WW2 comes in 5th and WW1 in 8th place.
We don't know how much of that general decline we can attribute to nukes. However, that wasn't the point. The point was that "peaceful" may describe USA and Western Europe post-WW2, but definitely not the rest of the world.
The fact is that the OP is right; the 'wars' you talk about barely even ranked MENTION in the history books before 1945. Proxy wars between greater powers, tribal genocides, border disputes between smaller states - the number of deaths in each of these were large, but their likelihood of conflagrating into world-consuming general war was incredibly low.
As were most wars prior to the Great War (WW1). World-consuming general war is an abnormality, no matter how you look at it.
The fact is that now wars are fought on a scale that would have made Rudyard Kipling laugh at their triviality. 100 casualties in a day is a massive tragedy for us - at Arras, the casualty rate was over 4000/day for two months.
Again, you have a rather distorted view of the world. What the heck are you looking at? US casualties in dramatically one-sided wars? The Korean war had an average of almost 3000 casualties per day, for three years. The Iran-Iraq war had ~350/day for eight years. The 2nd Congo war had ~2000/day for five years. It is your 4000/day for 2 months figure that pales in comparison.
I'm sure nukes have prevented a war between USA/USSR and major wars in Western Europe. But that doesn't mean "we all" have a peaceful time. Those of us who enjoyed that benefit are ~10% of the world population, and we did it at the cost of being afraid of armageddon for most of the time.
Under which scenario is it leaving better than it staying?
If it doesn't get detonated, searching for it is easier in a) a smaller area and b) an area where you can deploy all your assets without diplomatic nightmares, asking for permission, etc. etc.
If it does get detonated, sure the damage on your soil would be unfortunate. But having it blow up a foreign friendly country is one of those things you absolutely don't want to have as a problem. And having it blow up a foreign hostile country is a lot worse, including the potential for starting a war or two.
I can't imagine a scenario where a lost nuke leaving the country would be an advantage.
Users of cell phones and tablets are accustomed to apps being instantly available.
What?
Have you used one in the past two or three years? Yeah, the loading speeds are dramatically faster than on most desktop machines, but "instantly" is not the right word for complex and large apps, unless they are already loaded into memory because you used them before.
If you had, you'd found plenty of sites like this one (use the nav menu in the top-right corner, the navigation on the site is whack), which discuss the topic ad nauseum und link to even more sites that do even more of it.
I doubt there will be anything in the comments to this story that you couldn't find there.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it isn't. Fuck off you retarded pseudo-revolutionary.
I was to an ACTA demonstration today, and I am sick and tired and fucking pissed off at the juvenile idiots who turn every justified protest into an "against the system!" rally.
I'm happy with our government system. I am very unhappy with the people currently in it, but that's in a good part because we stupid idiots put them there. If you put your vote in for any of the major parties last election, no matter what your justification is, you are part of the problem.
And no, if you think you need to vote party A because otherwise party B which is even worse, will rule, then you have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. People like you are who keep the system stable, despite all your revolutionary rhetorics.
It is very likely that the user is a large part of the problem
Yes, but in an entirely different way than you mean it. The user isn't the dumb fool who is responsible for the whole mess - he is the weak link being exploited, and we blast him with "dumb user" ridicule instead of helping him out. Any surprise that users don't trust the geeks who should know better anymore? The IT department is not exactly admired in most companies. How it treats the users is one big reason why.
There are still people who download a piece of software just based on an ad on a website (free anti virus or whatever) and install that on their machine.
Yes, and
a) aside from telling them what a bunch of stupid fucks they are, we aren't helping them one bit making the right decision
b) they should absolutely be able to do that in a perfect world. We have the technology - why isn't every fucking program you download not automatically put into a sandbox? Why are extended permissions, where requested, presented to the user in a way that reads "program wants bla bla tech stuff, tech stuff, tech stuff, incomprehensible, tech bla bla" instead of telling the user what he needs to know in a language he can understand?
We are way too obsessed with technical solutions. In a car analogy, we haven't built systems supporting the driver and making the car safer, we have invented HUD technology and now distract the user from the road with constant warning messages, confirmation screens and then tell him that the rising number of road accidents is a clear sign that most drivers suck.
We are the idiots, not the users.
I've just given a talk on this on tuesday. Technology is a sideshow in the full picture of this crap. Phishing, spam, etc. are not primary technological problems. Botnets are just the currently most effective technology underlying this crap. Before botnets, we had rooted servers pumping out spam by the millions. We made that more difficult, so spammers went to easier targets and began building botnets. If we push them ouf of there, they will find other ways. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
Your argument is a moral, not a legal one. Legally, scamming a millionaire out of $1000 is the same as scamming a beggar out of his life savings of the same amount.
Because hypertext doesn't lend itself well to fiction. There isn't really much that you can add to a story with hypertext, and while a branching storyline sounds interesting in theory, that's exactly what it is: An interesting idea. By now the idea has been explored and found to be lacking.
Hypertext is great for non-fiction text, and I hope that the "revolution in textbooks" that Apple is trying - and the momentum that this will create for competition, results in more utilization in that sphere. A history book would be excellent if it were heavily interlinked, because most historic events are heavily interdependent with other events, with persons, locations, etc. etc.
I'm still studying the details, but either by now or by the next iteration, you can strike the term "C&C" from your vocabulary.
Basically, if you used signed commands, the humans controlling the network can inject their commands anywhere and it'll simply spread through the network.
This comes as a surprise to anyone? Really? I attended conferences almost 10 years ago listening to and giving speeches about stuff like this. The technology is trivial, the only reason the bad guys haven't moved to the hardened networks stuff yet is because there simply was no need.
If you want to know what's next, I can dig out my old slides. A guy from Britain and I came up with several highly resistant network designs. I think our final one would remain largely intact if you took out 90% of its nodes.
Like all things in fighting spam and large-scale scams, eliminating the C&C servers was one step that was useful for a short span in time. There are still old botnets out there that you can take out with this approach, but the more advanced ones have left that window of opportunity now.
As long as our politicians refuse to tackle the fundamental problem - that of tiny crimes in massive quantities - we're stuck. Our legal system still works by "cases", adapted to a physical world where the crime has an easily enumerated set of victims, each of which having suffered considerable damage. The legal and political systems still don't understand both the tiny and massive scales they need to deal with in a virtual world. Scam 10 people out of $1000 each and you'll get a court case and jail time. Scam 1,000,000 people out of a cent each and nobody in law enforcement will care, even though the damage to society is the same.
Ok, so let me get this straight:
They want to send encrypted content to a module that they sent me previously, encrypted so that it can be decrypted with a key that they send to said module?
Yeah, I can't imagine anything going wrong there...
It's not that easy. While there has been widespread protest, it's not like there were millions upon millions of people on the streets.
Germany has 99 members in the EU parliament. Germany has ~80 mio. people. That means every one of them represents almost a million people. At that size, stuff like "the opinion of the people who I represent" doesn't have much meaning.
Nevertheless, as far as politicians go, those in the EU parliament are largely the good guys. I still wouldn't buy a used car from them, but compared to the entirely undemocratic pseudo-aristocracy of the Commission, they're quite a lot better.
I don't "win" on /. - I don't care for winning an argument. And apparently we are having two entirely different arguments, too.
Notice that I don't even mention your laser alternative. I don't care. All I'm pointing out is that your "it's so dangerous, the sky is falling!" bullshit is exactly that - bullshit.
giyf. This is really old stuff, I'm not your google-secretary.
No, it won't.
I'm not going to play your google-slave, that stuff is trivial to find, so giyf.
The elevator itself will be the equivalent of a plane crash. Ridiculous except for those directly involved.
The cable won't cause any kind of major damage. It is not heavy enough and not falling fast enough, and depending on where it snaps, more or less of it will go up into space instead of down towards earth. The rest will sail down softly, because its mass relative to its surface area is quite small. Parts higher up will likely burn up in the atmosphere.
The counterweight would drift off into space if anything happens.
The only dangerous part would be the orbital station. Depending on its size and composition it may not burn up entirely upon re-entry, and parts of it could hit the surface. The equivalent of a large satellite coming down. Might be fireworks wherever it hits, might scatter debris over a large area like the shuttle, but it will be very far from anything globally or catastrophic.
Sorry, I misplaced that.
Yes, without doubt, WW1 had the most destructive battles to date, and many of them had more casualties than entire wars.
Going backward from WWI:
And then you list european wars that nobody outside Europe so much as cared about. That is exactly the point I am making.
When I say "world", I mean the planet, not the five countries that thought themselves the epicenter of everything for a short while.
Thus in the absolute sense, nuclear weapons have capped conflicts into remaining peripheral or proxy wars
No disagreement there.
My only point was against the great-great-...-parent who said that we all (emphasis mine) have enjoyed peaceful times ever since WW2, thanks to nukes.
And that simply isn't true, unless you have such a distorted view that the 40 or so mio. people who died in wars since WW2 don't count.
That's all I've ever critised. As long as you don't write "we all", but "we in the western world" or something, I completely agree.
Today I know why I still have /. in my dailys.
the helpful folks at EFF have posted some simple instructions showing how to delete your web history at Google.
That is exactly what I was looking for. Now if only someone could post a mirror, I'd be a happy camper.
This move by the commission is not to get a critical review. The commission is the undemocratic EU-level force pushing ACTA forward. The (elected) parliament is the one that would rather not have ACTA and one of the few entities that put massive pressure on the secret negotiations and has repeatedly voiced its disgust with the secrecy of it all.
This move by the commission is an attempt to put pressure on the EU parliament. If the court says that ACTA does not conflict with EU laws, then the parliament will have a harder time to justify voting against ACTA.
By getting the court's opinion now, the commission is disarming the EU parliament, taking away one of their reasons to refuse.
Many of your points have been debunked years ago, especially the falling cable problem. Please, try harder.
Politicians lie.
Yeah, that's all. There really is nothing to add to that.
But that is exactly the point I am making:
Yes, nukes prevented these wars from spreading into the actual countries that were behind them. They kept the USA and China/USSR in peace - but not Korea or Vietnam.
I didn't say there was no effect. But the GP claimed this effect was valid for "all of us", and it clearly isn't.
I completely agree with you and everyone else that the world has become more peaceful in general.
I don't agree that it's because of nukes, not outside USA, USSR and Western Europe.
On the general history of violence:
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
If you ain't from the USA, you don't exist. How could you exist if Hollywood wasn't around to make a movie about you guys.
Then I'm just soooo glad that I'm German - Hollywood has made tons of movies about us. In fact, if that is your unit of measurement, we're probably more real than you. :-)
You need to count all the other wars as well. I listed five of 150-200. Granted, the largest five, but still only 2-3% of the total number of conflicts. I don't have numbers, and many of those wars were fairly small, but I'd say we will easily reach another 40 mio. - i.e. another WW2.
Sure, WW2 is unmatched (WW1 not so much - look here for others).
However, we have a steady decline of violence in human history. If you look at the list I linked above, and sort by percentage of the world population, WW2 comes in 5th and WW1 in 8th place.
We don't know how much of that general decline we can attribute to nukes. However, that wasn't the point. The point was that "peaceful" may describe USA and Western Europe post-WW2, but definitely not the rest of the world.
The fact is that the OP is right; the 'wars' you talk about barely even ranked MENTION in the history books before 1945. Proxy wars between greater powers, tribal genocides, border disputes between smaller states - the number of deaths in each of these were large, but their likelihood of conflagrating into world-consuming general war was incredibly low.
As were most wars prior to the Great War (WW1). World-consuming general war is an abnormality, no matter how you look at it.
The fact is that now wars are fought on a scale that would have made Rudyard Kipling laugh at their triviality. 100 casualties in a day is a massive tragedy for us - at Arras, the casualty rate was over 4000/day for two months.
Again, you have a rather distorted view of the world. What the heck are you looking at? US casualties in dramatically one-sided wars? The Korean war had an average of almost 3000 casualties per day, for three years. The Iran-Iraq war had ~350/day for eight years. The 2nd Congo war had ~2000/day for five years.
It is your 4000/day for 2 months figure that pales in comparison.
I'm sure nukes have prevented a war between USA/USSR and major wars in Western Europe. But that doesn't mean "we all" have a peaceful time. Those of us who enjoyed that benefit are ~10% of the world population, and we did it at the cost of being afraid of armageddon for most of the time.
Why?
Under which scenario is it leaving better than it staying?
If it doesn't get detonated, searching for it is easier in a) a smaller area and b) an area where you can deploy all your assets without diplomatic nightmares, asking for permission, etc. etc.
If it does get detonated, sure the damage on your soil would be unfortunate. But having it blow up a foreign friendly country is one of those things you absolutely don't want to have as a problem. And having it blow up a foreign hostile country is a lot worse, including the potential for starting a war or two.
I can't imagine a scenario where a lost nuke leaving the country would be an advantage.
Users of cell phones and tablets are accustomed to apps being instantly available.
What?
Have you used one in the past two or three years? Yeah, the loading speeds are dramatically faster than on most desktop machines, but "instantly" is not the right word for complex and large apps, unless they are already loaded into memory because you used them before.
You didn't really Google.
If you had, you'd found plenty of sites like this one (use the nav menu in the top-right corner, the navigation on the site is whack), which discuss the topic ad nauseum und link to even more sites that do even more of it.
I doubt there will be anything in the comments to this story that you couldn't find there.