It has already been shown that areas other than the eyeballs respond to visible light below the obvious intensity of feeling heat (that is, not talking about bright sunlight). This may be a new specific point, but the general idea is not surprising. As for SAD and light therapy, I believe this is one of the things that - like allergies and food sensitivities - is very idiosyncratic and hard to standardize. But then, so is taste.
... but there is no reason to jump to conclusions.
I'd rather say: there is no reason to jump from anonymously collecting my gas tax, and maybe even adding an odometer tax at inspection time, to wearing a constant monitoring device like a criminal. If you want to charge more for highways or city streets, make them toll roads with E-Z-Pass-style systems (like London already has). That's not the same as tracking me every instant. (I object less if they want to do this on commercial vehicles, because there's less of a privacy issue, and commercial vehicles already have logging and reporting requirements.)
ps - re: "resources no longer constrained" - one job had a customer develop a large telephony application intended to run 6 E1 lines (6x30=180 channels). It was modeled on the Tech Support demo model of process-per-channel (under some version of Unix). Worked just great up until some 40 channels or so, then degraded rapidly from activating the next two or three and was unusable with two more. Paging takes time, interrupts take time, RAM is not infinite, and OS thrashing matters. I helped the customer restructure into a DOS-style single process with a big table of channel structures, servicing all available hardware on every interrupt, and suddenly the exact same hardware could handle 180 channels without crashing even if they all went off-hook at once (there *would* be a noticable lag, but acceptable for the purpose). Maybe in a system today with a multicore CPU and multi gigs of memory life would be fine . . . except they'd probably be expecting to have one monster 8GB server instead of four 1GB servers, so the problem would come right back.
Nothing is unlimited. There is always a bottleneck. Where "Joe" was failing was in recognizing that the bottleneck had moved. OTOH your solution will be a problem if the system maintains total isolation between tasks and multiple tasks try to do this operation at once.
I'm more "Joe"'s age, but have gotten things done in embedded systems by chasing the bottlenecks from memory to bandwidth to CPU and back around. The point of experience *should* be "find the bottleneck and fix it", not "assume it's the same as it was last project".
I remember an article years ago about one of the early online multiplayer space combat games in which the whole point was that the developers started realizing that faster modems or no, internet or BBS or whatever protocol, short messages for more bandwidth really mattered to avoid lag (like, the missiles should really appear to hit the targets). Instead of the nice clear open messages they had started with on their original design, they had to use delta coding and bit-masked fields and fractional information in different message codes and all kinds of hackery to keep the data transmission short, trading the availability of CPU time to encode and decode for the comm bandwidth available. I also seem to recall more recent articles pointing out how online gaming was rocked by wireless introducing slowness and lag after everyone had gotten used to DSL/cable/fiber modem speeds - same problem come around again.
The only way to fix it is to eliminate basic inequalities in our society.
I think a bigger part of the problem is that there's nothing for older teenagers to do. In Europe, under-drinking-age people can go into bars etc. with music, as long as they accept a wristband saying they can't buy alcohol; here, because of Prohibition-ism, they're turned away at the door instead of being restricted to sodas at the bar. So a lot of entertainment is unavailable, there's not as much community or non-commercial entertainment as there might have been years ago, and you've got people at an age ready to go out and do stuff with nothing to do, too much energy, and idle hands. Two or three generations ago they would already be considered working productive adults by that age (BTW I wasn't working, I was in college, where the rules are relaxed as long as you stay on-campus "in the family compound"). All of us were young once, and most of us managed to have some fun without vandalizing or stealing or getting arrested; the options keep being restricted in the name of safety, when it's a safe *outlet* that is needed.
If you weren't bothering anyone, and your friends taking late-night walks weren't bothering anyone, then people may not have even noticed. I grew up in NYC, with lots of police and strict laws, and you could *still* do some crazy stuff as long as you weren't bothering anyone else. (I did get a lecture or two about safety and technique, though.) The border between "delinquent with incendiaries" and "busking juggler" is all in attitude and behavior.
When the snacks & drink cart is in the aisle, people tend to stay seated because there's noplace to go. Yet most people don't feel "trapped" because they are being served. This is a deliberate situation.
On the other hand, I once sat next to a very friendly gentleman on an El Al flight who conversed freely for hours but always faced forward - neck problems from a sports injury, he said. Only after I offered him the window seat for the approach to NYC (since he'd never been there before) did he explain why he had to stay near the aisle . . . with a clear view of the little mirrors . . .
Isaac Asimov's short story, "Let's Get Together". Wikipedia says 1957. Androids were substituted for scientists who had attended conferences overseas; plan = when they all attended a major conference which would be addressed by the President, they would get together . . . reaching critical mass.
Mod parent up. Maybe someone in IT security has an isolated disconnected custom-built Linux kernel system that can examine a USB stick without any automatic reading, but normal people should be able to do it too by default. At least you should be able to see the file names, and the disk information that might identify the owner. If someone runs an executable, then I'd agree that person is an idiot;
Allowing document formats to be programs was a stupid idea and comes from the same stupid people who invented autorun.
We don't wire wall current to our door locks so that we electrocute ourselves next time we insert a key. We shouldn't allow programs or data or commands to go the other way either without specific action.
Microsoft may have the technical ability to intercept private conversations, but it doesn't have the legal authority....This should be no more worrisome than your telephone companies building in tapping capabilities
And therein lies a problem. Part of the battle about phone service over cable-originally-intended-for-TV was precisely about whether the cable operator would or wouldn't become a "common carrier" subject to the same rules as the phone company, and required to provide service to *all* locations, and required to collect the same taxes and fees - with details like being subject to the same responsibilities to not abuse their access to users' phone calls. Skype, or any other VoIP, is even further away from being a "common carrier"; heck, Skype admits that it bounces messages off users' computers when they are running the Skype client; imagine if the phone company was drawing on your power to run your neighbor's phone. It wouldn't surprise me for Microsoft to argue that they're not "intercepting" "private" communications, because after all it's just ones and zeros and it's floating around in the global tubes for anyone to see.
I think it was Alan Dean Foster's "Quozl" in which the traveling aliens have ultra-realistic game setups (not quite a holodeck) in which they can hunt and messily kill their prey from back home. Without that opportunity to drain the aggression from their systems, they know they would turn on each other as easily as on outsiders. Cesar Milan, "The Dog Whisperer", often talks about making sure one uses up a pet's energy for similar reasons. Why should anyone be surprised that humans have the same problem - especially humans who aren't satisfied with just sitting and reading/.?
I vote for aging. I also used to have a good sense of direction, particularly with maintaining a consistent travel direction despite roads angling and turning, or being underwater (handy as a teenaged lifeguard). I simply assumed that ability, same as being able to imagine a 3D object from engineering plans and projections. Over time, it has become much less reliable.
I don't believe in magic, but I do believe that humans have lots of little abilities that we haven't measured yet because we haven't found the things to measure and haven't invented the units to measure with.
... take up vastly more screen space with its UI...
This was my biggest problem on both an older laptop and a newer netbook. The nice simple narrow column with normal text became a window with icons and big text that didn't even fit on the old laptop's screen resolution.
>>My personal book collection is a bunch of Weber, Laumer, and Harrison books,.... Foundation... Hardy Boy.....
You bolster my hope for the future.:-) Go find James H Schmitz, Cordwainter Smith, and Gordon Dickson.
Sorry, no. The paper is cheaper and more acidic, and will probably decay faster than books from the 1800s if left on a shelf. I have lots of books that my father bought new in the 1950s that are already showing their age.
That said, and echoing an earlier comment - this has been discussed in science fiction repeatedly over the years, even to the "rediscovery" of reading (since, after all, everyone is used to having their information spoken to them by their computers) (sorry, not remembering the title offhand) and arithmetic ("A Feeling of Power", Asimov).
Note I didn't say "is", I said "should be". And we should NOT be creating new and distinct laws, beyond maybe a new law saying "This should be treated under the old law for safe deposit boxes". The problem has already existed for safe deposit boxes, post-office boxes, non-post-office boxes (like the former MailBoxesEtc). If a particular bank branch is closed (or moved), there is a whole protocol for notifying box holders and handling things if people don't show up in time.
That said, I agree with other posters that if it's not already in your contract, you made a mistake putting your data there in the first place; and even if it is, you may find that bankruptcy court considers the data the server's because it's on their computers, or considers the data of no monetary value and just sells off the hardware. I also agree that I would not use abstract cloud services for sensitive data. Remote hosting, or remote co-location, where I own a specific machine in a secure location, is a different story (I hope).
/.ers know what you're talking about, and may even know how to do it. Normal people just buy a router at Best Buy and plug it in. (I use WPA and MAC authentication, and the router provided by Verizon has a terrible interface that would be confusing to any non-techie.)
With or without security, if someone can sit in a cafe and download (insert-objectionable-thing-here), and the legal system still assumes that the cafe owners are responsible for everything that goes across their wire, then the only safe option is to *not* offer wifi anywhere.
It doesn't even have to be the primary generator. If it makes the difference between (for example) the Tesla's claimed range of ~240 miles with one passenger (only good for commuting locally where you can back home to plug it in) and a real round-trip weekend ride with a passenger from (e.g.) NYC to Boston or Washington (even if the generator has to run all night to generate for the return), then suddenly an electric car becomes worth buying as one's only car instead of just for commuting. The key points are that (1) electricity is easier to redirect than torque, and (2) now that pure electric cars exist (all the design work of batteries and motors and controls has improved) it's worth rethinking the generator concept at this power level. Trains use diesel generators to drive electric motors rather than drive shafts and clutches; it just hasn't been efficient at the individual car size.
When you buy a beer at a bar, they charge you the same price whether it's the top of the barrel or the bottom, the first bottle in the case or the last. There's no sacred reason that internet usage should be "all you can eat", since ISPs are in business to make money.
I agree with you that "congestion pricing" would be better to balance out usage; and then they offer "quality of service" choices, and suddenly we wind up with a tiered service level controlled by those who can pay, just like space on supermarket shelves where small or new players can't even get a spot.
What I'd like to see, ever since grade school: Punish the troublemakers. Don't punish everyone, don't raise everyone's rates, just find the IP address that's maxing out its bandwidth all day and deal with its user. Heck, maybe he'll be happy to find out that his system is pwned.
Yes, but can they publish it? particularly with identification? Being shown in a crowd shot at a public event is reasonable; when it becomes a very personally-identifiable shot, and has your name on it . . . except on Facebook it could have been put up as an anonymous group shot and some "helpful" friend tagged it. Neither poster nor tagger did anything "bad", yet the result might be bad. Does this mean that privacy is like STDs, in that the weakest link in the chain will break everybody?
Weren't there a few WW2-era movies, and then TV shows, about "special ops" teams formed by giving long-term inmates that kind of choice? Not that I'm confusing fiction with reality, but the idea isn't new. Maybe the kind of people needed for such a mission aren't PhDs and engineers and scientists, but tough-minded hard people with nothing to lose.
This attempt to create a false dichotomy between online activities and traditional physical activities is a smoke screen, no more and no less.
Sadly, techies like us are somewhat responsible. In trying to convince people to use the Internet commercially, the differences were overemphasized. "Visiting" a web "site" was totally different from reading a magazine or catalog; ordering through a web site totally different from mail order that existed since the previous century. Now we're trying to turn that around, convincing the general public that email and VOIP are just like phone calls, and that "net neutrality" should be just like "phone call neutrality", and that automatic packet inspection would be like automatic wiretapping; but we're fighting the industry's own earlier marketing.
I'm not as worried about "The Government" (capitals on purpose) as a monster entity, as I am about the individuals in the system being able to misuse things with impunity. Right now it's very clear that this stuff has a classification level, and requires authorization, and anyone misusing it is violating some kind of trust. If it's always open, with no restraint, then there's no protection from abuse at all. It's enough of a change in *degree* to become a change in *kind*.
It's also much too easy for the government to start random fishing expeditions, scanning every word all the time, simply because it's automated. Wiretaps are supposed to be focused on a target, and done with human intelligence. I accept that law enforcement does need some surveillance ability; on the other hand, just like the parallel case of the TSA agents frisking everyone up to the gonads, our system is *not* supposed to be built on an assumption of guilt until proven innocent (and proving a negative is sort of tough anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
It has already been shown that areas other than the eyeballs respond to visible light below the obvious intensity of feeling heat (that is, not talking about bright sunlight). This may be a new specific point, but the general idea is not surprising. As for SAD and light therapy, I believe this is one of the things that - like allergies and food sensitivities - is very idiosyncratic and hard to standardize. But then, so is taste.
... but there is no reason to jump to conclusions.
I'd rather say: there is no reason to jump from anonymously collecting my gas tax, and maybe even adding an odometer tax at inspection time, to wearing a constant monitoring device like a criminal. If you want to charge more for highways or city streets, make them toll roads with E-Z-Pass-style systems (like London already has). That's not the same as tracking me every instant. (I object less if they want to do this on commercial vehicles, because there's less of a privacy issue, and commercial vehicles already have logging and reporting requirements.)
ps - re: "resources no longer constrained" - one job had a customer develop a large telephony application intended to run 6 E1 lines (6x30=180 channels). It was modeled on the Tech Support demo model of process-per-channel (under some version of Unix). Worked just great up until some 40 channels or so, then degraded rapidly from activating the next two or three and was unusable with two more. Paging takes time, interrupts take time, RAM is not infinite, and OS thrashing matters. I helped the customer restructure into a DOS-style single process with a big table of channel structures, servicing all available hardware on every interrupt, and suddenly the exact same hardware could handle 180 channels without crashing even if they all went off-hook at once (there *would* be a noticable lag, but acceptable for the purpose). Maybe in a system today with a multicore CPU and multi gigs of memory life would be fine . . . except they'd probably be expecting to have one monster 8GB server instead of four 1GB servers, so the problem would come right back.
Nothing is unlimited. There is always a bottleneck. Where "Joe" was failing was in recognizing that the bottleneck had moved. OTOH your solution will be a problem if the system maintains total isolation between tasks and multiple tasks try to do this operation at once.
I'm more "Joe"'s age, but have gotten things done in embedded systems by chasing the bottlenecks from memory to bandwidth to CPU and back around. The point of experience *should* be "find the bottleneck and fix it", not "assume it's the same as it was last project".
I remember an article years ago about one of the early online multiplayer space combat games in which the whole point was that the developers started realizing that faster modems or no, internet or BBS or whatever protocol, short messages for more bandwidth really mattered to avoid lag (like, the missiles should really appear to hit the targets). Instead of the nice clear open messages they had started with on their original design, they had to use delta coding and bit-masked fields and fractional information in different message codes and all kinds of hackery to keep the data transmission short, trading the availability of CPU time to encode and decode for the comm bandwidth available. I also seem to recall more recent articles pointing out how online gaming was rocked by wireless introducing slowness and lag after everyone had gotten used to DSL/cable/fiber modem speeds - same problem come around again.
The only way to fix it is to eliminate basic inequalities in our society.
I think a bigger part of the problem is that there's nothing for older teenagers to do. In Europe, under-drinking-age people can go into bars etc. with music, as long as they accept a wristband saying they can't buy alcohol; here, because of Prohibition-ism, they're turned away at the door instead of being restricted to sodas at the bar. So a lot of entertainment is unavailable, there's not as much community or non-commercial entertainment as there might have been years ago, and you've got people at an age ready to go out and do stuff with nothing to do, too much energy, and idle hands. Two or three generations ago they would already be considered working productive adults by that age (BTW I wasn't working, I was in college, where the rules are relaxed as long as you stay on-campus "in the family compound"). All of us were young once, and most of us managed to have some fun without vandalizing or stealing or getting arrested; the options keep being restricted in the name of safety, when it's a safe *outlet* that is needed.
If you weren't bothering anyone, and your friends taking late-night walks weren't bothering anyone, then people may not have even noticed. I grew up in NYC, with lots of police and strict laws, and you could *still* do some crazy stuff as long as you weren't bothering anyone else. (I did get a lecture or two about safety and technique, though.) The border between "delinquent with incendiaries" and "busking juggler" is all in attitude and behavior.
When the snacks & drink cart is in the aisle, people tend to stay seated because there's noplace to go. Yet most people don't feel "trapped" because they are being served. This is a deliberate situation.
On the other hand, I once sat next to a very friendly gentleman on an El Al flight who conversed freely for hours but always faced forward - neck problems from a sports injury, he said. Only after I offered him the window seat for the approach to NYC (since he'd never been there before) did he explain why he had to stay near the aisle . . . with a clear view of the little mirrors . . .
Isaac Asimov's short story, "Let's Get Together". Wikipedia says 1957. Androids were substituted for scientists who had attended conferences overseas; plan = when they all attended a major conference which would be addressed by the President, they would get together . . . reaching critical mass.
Mod parent up. Maybe someone in IT security has an isolated disconnected custom-built Linux kernel system that can examine a USB stick without any automatic reading, but normal people should be able to do it too by default. At least you should be able to see the file names, and the disk information that might identify the owner. If someone runs an executable, then I'd agree that person is an idiot;
Allowing document formats to be programs was a stupid idea and comes from the same stupid people who invented autorun.
We don't wire wall current to our door locks so that we electrocute ourselves next time we insert a key. We shouldn't allow programs or data or commands to go the other way either without specific action.
Microsoft may have the technical ability to intercept private conversations, but it doesn't have the legal authority....This should be no more worrisome than your telephone companies building in tapping capabilities
And therein lies a problem. Part of the battle about phone service over cable-originally-intended-for-TV was precisely about whether the cable operator would or wouldn't become a "common carrier" subject to the same rules as the phone company, and required to provide service to *all* locations, and required to collect the same taxes and fees - with details like being subject to the same responsibilities to not abuse their access to users' phone calls. Skype, or any other VoIP, is even further away from being a "common carrier"; heck, Skype admits that it bounces messages off users' computers when they are running the Skype client; imagine if the phone company was drawing on your power to run your neighbor's phone. It wouldn't surprise me for Microsoft to argue that they're not "intercepting" "private" communications, because after all it's just ones and zeros and it's floating around in the global tubes for anyone to see.
I think it was Alan Dean Foster's "Quozl" in which the traveling aliens have ultra-realistic game setups (not quite a holodeck) in which they can hunt and messily kill their prey from back home. Without that opportunity to drain the aggression from their systems, they know they would turn on each other as easily as on outsiders. Cesar Milan, "The Dog Whisperer", often talks about making sure one uses up a pet's energy for similar reasons. Why should anyone be surprised that humans have the same problem - especially humans who aren't satisfied with just sitting and reading /.?
I vote for aging. I also used to have a good sense of direction, particularly with maintaining a consistent travel direction despite roads angling and turning, or being underwater (handy as a teenaged lifeguard). I simply assumed that ability, same as being able to imagine a 3D object from engineering plans and projections. Over time, it has become much less reliable.
I don't believe in magic, but I do believe that humans have lots of little abilities that we haven't measured yet because we haven't found the things to measure and haven't invented the units to measure with.
... take up vastly more screen space with its UI...
This was my biggest problem on both an older laptop and a newer netbook. The nice simple narrow column with normal text became a window with icons and big text that didn't even fit on the old laptop's screen resolution.
>>My personal book collection is a bunch of Weber, Laumer, and Harrison books, .... Foundation... Hardy Boy.....
You bolster my hope for the future. :-) Go find James H Schmitz, Cordwainter Smith, and Gordon Dickson.
Sorry, no. The paper is cheaper and more acidic, and will probably decay faster than books from the 1800s if left on a shelf. I have lots of books that my father bought new in the 1950s that are already showing their age.
That said, and echoing an earlier comment - this has been discussed in science fiction repeatedly over the years, even to the "rediscovery" of reading (since, after all, everyone is used to having their information spoken to them by their computers) (sorry, not remembering the title offhand) and arithmetic ("A Feeling of Power", Asimov).
Note I didn't say "is", I said "should be". And we should NOT be creating new and distinct laws, beyond maybe a new law saying "This should be treated under the old law for safe deposit boxes". The problem has already existed for safe deposit boxes, post-office boxes, non-post-office boxes (like the former MailBoxesEtc). If a particular bank branch is closed (or moved), there is a whole protocol for notifying box holders and handling things if people don't show up in time.
That said, I agree with other posters that if it's not already in your contract, you made a mistake putting your data there in the first place; and even if it is, you may find that bankruptcy court considers the data the server's because it's on their computers, or considers the data of no monetary value and just sells off the hardware. I also agree that I would not use abstract cloud services for sensitive data. Remote hosting, or remote co-location, where I own a specific machine in a secure location, is a different story (I hope).
/.ers know what you're talking about, and may even know how to do it. Normal people just buy a router at Best Buy and plug it in. (I use WPA and MAC authentication, and the router provided by Verizon has a terrible interface that would be confusing to any non-techie.)
With or without security, if someone can sit in a cafe and download (insert-objectionable-thing-here), and the legal system still assumes that the cafe owners are responsible for everything that goes across their wire, then the only safe option is to *not* offer wifi anywhere.
It doesn't even have to be the primary generator. If it makes the difference between (for example) the Tesla's claimed range of ~240 miles with one passenger (only good for commuting locally where you can back home to plug it in) and a real round-trip weekend ride with a passenger from (e.g.) NYC to Boston or Washington (even if the generator has to run all night to generate for the return), then suddenly an electric car becomes worth buying as one's only car instead of just for commuting. The key points are that (1) electricity is easier to redirect than torque, and (2) now that pure electric cars exist (all the design work of batteries and motors and controls has improved) it's worth rethinking the generator concept at this power level. Trains use diesel generators to drive electric motors rather than drive shafts and clutches; it just hasn't been efficient at the individual car size.
When you buy a beer at a bar, they charge you the same price whether it's the top of the barrel or the bottom, the first bottle in the case or the last. There's no sacred reason that internet usage should be "all you can eat", since ISPs are in business to make money. I agree with you that "congestion pricing" would be better to balance out usage; and then they offer "quality of service" choices, and suddenly we wind up with a tiered service level controlled by those who can pay, just like space on supermarket shelves where small or new players can't even get a spot. What I'd like to see, ever since grade school: Punish the troublemakers. Don't punish everyone, don't raise everyone's rates, just find the IP address that's maxing out its bandwidth all day and deal with its user. Heck, maybe he'll be happy to find out that his system is pwned.
Yes, but can they publish it? particularly with identification? Being shown in a crowd shot at a public event is reasonable; when it becomes a very personally-identifiable shot, and has your name on it . . . except on Facebook it could have been put up as an anonymous group shot and some "helpful" friend tagged it. Neither poster nor tagger did anything "bad", yet the result might be bad. Does this mean that privacy is like STDs, in that the weakest link in the chain will break everybody?
I'm more worried that people can generate random barcodes and it'll charge to random accounts, including mine.
Weren't there a few WW2-era movies, and then TV shows, about "special ops" teams formed by giving long-term inmates that kind of choice? Not that I'm confusing fiction with reality, but the idea isn't new. Maybe the kind of people needed for such a mission aren't PhDs and engineers and scientists, but tough-minded hard people with nothing to lose.
This attempt to create a false dichotomy between online activities and traditional physical activities is a smoke screen, no more and no less.
Sadly, techies like us are somewhat responsible. In trying to convince people to use the Internet commercially, the differences were overemphasized. "Visiting" a web "site" was totally different from reading a magazine or catalog; ordering through a web site totally different from mail order that existed since the previous century. Now we're trying to turn that around, convincing the general public that email and VOIP are just like phone calls, and that "net neutrality" should be just like "phone call neutrality", and that automatic packet inspection would be like automatic wiretapping; but we're fighting the industry's own earlier marketing.
Mod++ Devious. Twisted. And probably 100% true. :-)
I'm not as worried about "The Government" (capitals on purpose) as a monster entity, as I am about the individuals in the system being able to misuse things with impunity. Right now it's very clear that this stuff has a classification level, and requires authorization, and anyone misusing it is violating some kind of trust. If it's always open, with no restraint, then there's no protection from abuse at all. It's enough of a change in *degree* to become a change in *kind*.
It's also much too easy for the government to start random fishing expeditions, scanning every word all the time, simply because it's automated. Wiretaps are supposed to be focused on a target, and done with human intelligence. I accept that law enforcement does need some surveillance ability; on the other hand, just like the parallel case of the TSA agents frisking everyone up to the gonads, our system is *not* supposed to be built on an assumption of guilt until proven innocent (and proving a negative is sort of tough anyway).