So many people get reported as preverts (falsely or otherwise), that being accused of pedophilia loses its newsworthiness. Therefore nobody's life gets ruined anymore by false accusations.
I noticed this with one of the very few movies I've seen on a plane - The Truman Show.
I had seen it before. When Truman went to the travel agency to attempt to go to Fiji, the travel agency was set up to discourage people from travelling. In the regular cut of the movie, there was a poster showing an airliner, lightning striking the engine, about to crash into the ocean, with a big "It Could Happen To You" caption. Shots of that poster were missing on the airline version.
If I'm unable to be depressed, would I be able to care about what seems to be a series of bad things shaping the world?
Sometimes it's better not to care. Imagine if, like many here, you're gifted with the ability to see patterns and how things work. Apply this to everyday life as represented in/., or by working in the programming industry. Consequences:
You're convinced that the U.S. is going to be a bankrupt third-world country in your lifetime, and most of the world economy will likely follow. This keeps you from wanting to have children, because you don't want to put them through a foraging-through-dumpsters-for-food lifestyle.
You're convinced that your job will be sent to India by your company Anytime Now, and there's no way to resist, so there's no good reason to care about what they want you to do. Changing companies won't help, all others are doing the same thing.
You won't even be able to work on open-source software, as it will be killed off by Trusted Computing in the name of preventing entertainment piracy.
Corporations will grow ever more powerful, until they're unconstrained by governments or consumers. Then we'll have the good old days of company stores and towns, plus products you have to buy but have no recourse if they're faulty. Everything will lead inexorably to a small plutocracy of ultra-rich, and everyone else will live as serfs.
Ignorance is bliss, man; trying to care about the bad things happening on a global scale will just paralyze you.
It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it
You forget, corporations are not allowed to have any ethical restrictions on their behavior above legal restrictions. Ethics get in the way of continuously increasing profit growth rates - that's bad for the shareholders.
As for legal restrictions, once the ISP becomes a "competitor" of those services, who will blame them for downgrading their competitors? Right now there's no law saying Time Warner can't kill my connections to VoicePulse because it competes with their DigitalPhone service (even though DigitalPhone doesn't provide the IAX termination I need). That's what this whole debate is about.
You probably did the right thing. Children getting abducted by strangers is very rare (anyone got real stats? I'm too lazy). Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear has some good stuff about our tendencies to mis-estimate risks, especially for rare events.
Example: I vaguely remember reading somewhere that more people are killed by pigs each year than terrorists, yet we don't have a War On Pork.
The way I see it, the problem with young boys and pornography is: Because of their limited experience (I'm not just talking about sexually, but socially as well) with real women, if they consume lots of porn, they might get warped ideas about real women.
For example, even from soft-core stuff, they might get the idea that all women are just a couple of drinks away from a girl-on-girl adventure. This kind of thing can be mitigated with decent sex ed and frank discussions.
Like you, I'd rather see more sex and less violence in our popular culture (make love, not war!)
Another option is to move to a place with decent insurance regulation, like North Carolina.
For example, they hit BCBS with a big fine for dragging their feet on paying back ER claims. It used to be that if you went to the ER, and your problem turned out to not be an emergency (e.g. you thought were having a heart attack but it turned out to be nothing), then they could deny the claim, pay at out-of-network rates, etc. NC changed the law to require a "reasonable person" standard - if a reasonable person would consider the problem to be a medical emergency, the insurance company needed to treat the claim as though it really was an emergency (paid at in-network rates at any hospital, etc.) BCBS was dragging their feet on getting their systems updated and paying back claims (plus interest) from the time the law went into effect. IIRC the fine was more than the amount of unpaid claims...
That's one of the more egregious "bugs in society" - the general problem is that it costs more to be poor. You see this other places than medicine, of course (interest rates, prepaid utilities, etc).
All instances of that "bug" make it harder to climb out of poverty once you hit it. Each individual instance makes sense for the companies involved (e.g. for medical care, the insurance company gets a "bulk discount", for loans, you're a higher risk, etc.) but the total effect is bad for society.
This particular instance could be fixed with universal health insurance, such as they have in France. Imagine the bulk discounts possible when everyone is on the same plan. Governments do pretty well cheaping-out on paying for stuff, as well.
Here is a report (big PDF) on threat models against elections, from the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security (includes Bruce Schneier).
They look at what it takes to alter enough votes to swing a statewide election, and rank the difficulty by the number of people who would have to be "in on" the conspiracy.
If you have a machine with no paper trail, or if the paper trail you have is not audited, then only one person is needed to swing the election - to plant a Trojan in the voting machine software.
If you have a paper trail that's randomly audited, and any centralized storage of the voted ballots is secure enough, you need a pretty big conspiracy to swing a statewide election (you'd need at least one person at a whole bunch of precincts).
They go on to describe countermeasures that can be used to thwart or mitigate suck attacks - interesting read. I'm proud to say that my county has most of them implemented.
The federal Help America Vote Act requires that every polling place have technology that enables disabled voters (poor / no eyesight in our case) vote without assistance. Whether this was implemented in a genuine attempt to be helpful, in an attempt to look like lawmakers were Doing Something in the wake of the 2000 debacle, or in a cynical ploy to get more electronic voting machines that can be easily rigged, depends on your cynicism and paranoia levels.
In Wake County, NC, we do this in about the best way I can imagine. Every precinct has a fancy touch-screen / audio-with-headphones machine to mark ballots. That machine simply fills in the circles on the same ScanTron ballot everyone else uses, then the ballot is fed into the same scanner machine everyone else uses.
Some of this is because many of us have experience in the commercial software industry, which exemplifies the worst of these trends (because of lack of capital requirements, maybe?)
Think about it... in the commercial software industry, have you ever seen any company that didn't do their projects in death-march style, release stuff half-tested to make some quarterly revenue numbers, or take any development option that cost more up-front (even if it would have great payoffs later)?
Certainly, in other industries there may be inertia keeping the short-term thinking somewhat at bay.
Can anyone name a company that has a more long-term focus than they did 10 years ago? Can anyone not name 100 companies with the opposite problem?
Aside: A former manager of mine (close to retirement) explained the difference thusly: These days, executives are displosable employees just like you and me. In the olden days, if you were going to retire from a company, you wanted it to be stable in the long term. Nowadays, execs know they'll be in different jobs in 5 years, and they certainly won't retire with pensions, so they have no reason to care about the long-term health of the company.
The whole point of TPM is to be able to restrict what the computer's owner can do with the machine or the information thereon. Keep in mind that also, a computer's owner (as far as software is concerned) is essentially whoever has physical possesion of the machine.
The Army could use TPM to ensure that even if a machine is stolen physically or owned by malware, its software and information can be kept safe.
On-grid solar also has an advantage: You can just use a grid-tie inverter, instead of a regular inverter, charge controller, and batteries. Not having to buy (and maintain, and replace) batteries is quite the money savings.
Downside: Your solar isn't giving you any power while the grid is down, even if it's sunny.
Because the BBB is a trade association, they really don't have any power over anyone but their members. The collection of complaint stats on non-members is helpful, though, to people who check beforehand, and to find patterns indicating scamsters (who'd get handed off to the state AG or the FTC.
They can and will revoke a member's membership if complaints don't get resolved (note that this doesn't mean "resolved in the customer's favor", though). That's the only leverage the BBB has over members.
They're non-profit, and there are a lot of members, most of whom pay the same or similar amounts for their membership. Therefore, the BBB doesn't need to bend over backwards for any particular member.
They always refer people to the state Attorney General for fraud complaints, and for illegal scams (postal foreign lotteries, etc.) The AG is the one with the power to lay the smackdown on the company.
This is the extent of outrage in "this new era"?!?
Don't know about the author, but personally I'm "outrage fatigued". If I actually felt outrage at all the things I don't like (see: pretty much any YRO article, standard corporate behavior, etc.) I'd never be able to do anything else but pound on stuff while sobbing.
This is basically what I think the cause of OSS's better reliability is.
In my opinion, it's not so much the personalities, it's the lack of commercial taint. When was the last time an OSS project released something half-done to make quarterly numbers look better?
We occasionally get grazed by hurricanes, though big damage is rare (since Fran in 1996). We see snow once or twice a winter, and, when it does snow, the whole city shuts down. No measurable civil unrest at least since I've been here (1998).
See the movie "Antitrust" for a way that spy-cams can be turned into the equivalent of a network tap (spoiler follows):
In that movie, the Big Evil Pacific Northwest Software Company was stealing code from independent developers. Nobody figured out how, because these people "had the best firewalls". Turned out that the evil corp planted cameras in those developers' workspaces, watching their screens.
I don't think this is possible given U.S. corporate practices or the market for software. My day job talked about trying to shoot for long-term success, but of course they're still fighting short-term fires (layoff when a customer has a bad quarter, stage releases to get something barely working out the door, keep cutting test time, etc.) Don't know whether they were really going to do it and failed, or whether they were just telling the engineers what they wanted to hear.
Since neither your company or your customers can think long-term, your company will just lose all of its business if it tries to do things right. Of course, there may be customers out there that both demand quality software and are willing to pay more and/or wait for it. I'd love to see some examples.
It takes things getting bad enough so that enough people to successfully carry out a revolution are willing to risk near-certain death.
I doubt anyone reading./ has a bad enough daily life that they'd be willing to take up arms against the world's largest army.
It might seem like any non-violent ways of effecting change that benefits regular people are dead in the U.S. I personally think the electoral system is not quite dead yet:
Dissidents aren't being "disappeared" by the incumbent government (though the more cynical among us probably see the prerequisites for this in progress...)
Ballot access laws are tough, sure, but not impossible. It would take far fewer pissed-off people to run reform candidates by petition (e.g. in NC you need 4% of your registered-voter constituency) than it would take to foment a successful revolution.
If enough people get pissed off, even "mainstream party" candidates may appear who are sympathetic to our goals; it would guarantee them a big voting bloc.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget the safest sex of all, with the person you love the most.
Maybe this tool will help that problem:
So many people get reported as preverts (falsely or otherwise), that being accused of pedophilia loses its newsworthiness. Therefore nobody's life gets ruined anymore by false accusations.
I noticed this with one of the very few movies I've seen on a plane - The Truman Show.
I had seen it before. When Truman went to the travel agency to attempt to go to Fiji, the travel agency was set up to discourage people from travelling. In the regular cut of the movie, there was a poster showing an airliner, lightning striking the engine, about to crash into the ocean, with a big "It Could Happen To You" caption. Shots of that poster were missing on the airline version.
There's a great data point that shows that antidepressants don't artificially make you happy.
They don't have any street value. If they made you happy (that's pretty much what "getting high" means) then people would illicitly abuse them.
Sometimes it's better not to care. Imagine if, like many here, you're gifted with the ability to see patterns and how things work. Apply this to everyday life as represented in /., or by working in the programming industry. Consequences:
Ignorance is bliss, man; trying to care about the bad things happening on a global scale will just paralyze you.
(Shit, maybe it's time to swear off /. again.)
You forget, corporations are not allowed to have any ethical restrictions on their behavior above legal restrictions. Ethics get in the way of continuously increasing profit growth rates - that's bad for the shareholders.
As for legal restrictions, once the ISP becomes a "competitor" of those services, who will blame them for downgrading their competitors? Right now there's no law saying Time Warner can't kill my connections to VoicePulse because it competes with their DigitalPhone service (even though DigitalPhone doesn't provide the IAX termination I need). That's what this whole debate is about.
The dress doesn't make you look fat; your big butt makes you look fat.
You probably did the right thing. Children getting abducted by strangers is very rare (anyone got real stats? I'm too lazy). Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear has some good stuff about our tendencies to mis-estimate risks, especially for rare events.
Example: I vaguely remember reading somewhere that more people are killed by pigs each year than terrorists, yet we don't have a War On Pork.
The way I see it, the problem with young boys and pornography is: Because of their limited experience (I'm not just talking about sexually, but socially as well) with real women, if they consume lots of porn, they might get warped ideas about real women.
For example, even from soft-core stuff, they might get the idea that all women are just a couple of drinks away from a girl-on-girl adventure. This kind of thing can be mitigated with decent sex ed and frank discussions.
Like you, I'd rather see more sex and less violence in our popular culture (make love, not war!)
Another option is to move to a place with decent insurance regulation, like North Carolina.
For example, they hit BCBS with a big fine for dragging their feet on paying back ER claims. It used to be that if you went to the ER, and your problem turned out to not be an emergency (e.g. you thought were having a heart attack but it turned out to be nothing), then they could deny the claim, pay at out-of-network rates, etc. NC changed the law to require a "reasonable person" standard - if a reasonable person would consider the problem to be a medical emergency, the insurance company needed to treat the claim as though it really was an emergency (paid at in-network rates at any hospital, etc.) BCBS was dragging their feet on getting their systems updated and paying back claims (plus interest) from the time the law went into effect. IIRC the fine was more than the amount of unpaid claims...
That's one of the more egregious "bugs in society" - the general problem is that it costs more to be poor. You see this other places than medicine, of course (interest rates, prepaid utilities, etc).
All instances of that "bug" make it harder to climb out of poverty once you hit it. Each individual instance makes sense for the companies involved (e.g. for medical care, the insurance company gets a "bulk discount", for loans, you're a higher risk, etc.) but the total effect is bad for society.
This particular instance could be fixed with universal health insurance, such as they have in France. Imagine the bulk discounts possible when everyone is on the same plan. Governments do pretty well cheaping-out on paying for stuff, as well.
Because it makes fraud a lot harder!
Here is a report (big PDF) on threat models against elections, from the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security (includes Bruce Schneier).
They look at what it takes to alter enough votes to swing a statewide election, and rank the difficulty by the number of people who would have to be "in on" the conspiracy.
If you have a machine with no paper trail, or if the paper trail you have is not audited, then only one person is needed to swing the election - to plant a Trojan in the voting machine software.
If you have a paper trail that's randomly audited, and any centralized storage of the voted ballots is secure enough, you need a pretty big conspiracy to swing a statewide election (you'd need at least one person at a whole bunch of precincts).
They go on to describe countermeasures that can be used to thwart or mitigate suck attacks - interesting read. I'm proud to say that my county has most of them implemented.
The federal Help America Vote Act requires that every polling place have technology that enables disabled voters (poor / no eyesight in our case) vote without assistance. Whether this was implemented in a genuine attempt to be helpful, in an attempt to look like lawmakers were Doing Something in the wake of the 2000 debacle, or in a cynical ploy to get more electronic voting machines that can be easily rigged, depends on your cynicism and paranoia levels.
In Wake County, NC, we do this in about the best way I can imagine. Every precinct has a fancy touch-screen / audio-with-headphones machine to mark ballots. That machine simply fills in the circles on the same ScanTron ballot everyone else uses, then the ballot is fed into the same scanner machine everyone else uses.
Some of this is because many of us have experience in the commercial software industry, which exemplifies the worst of these trends (because of lack of capital requirements, maybe?)
Think about it... in the commercial software industry, have you ever seen any company that didn't do their projects in death-march style, release stuff half-tested to make some quarterly revenue numbers, or take any development option that cost more up-front (even if it would have great payoffs later)?
Certainly, in other industries there may be inertia keeping the short-term thinking somewhat at bay.
Can anyone name a company that has a more long-term focus than they did 10 years ago? Can anyone not name 100 companies with the opposite problem?
Aside: A former manager of mine (close to retirement) explained the difference thusly: These days, executives are displosable employees just like you and me. In the olden days, if you were going to retire from a company, you wanted it to be stable in the long term. Nowadays, execs know they'll be in different jobs in 5 years, and they certainly won't retire with pensions, so they have no reason to care about the long-term health of the company.
... for the Army's applications!
The whole point of TPM is to be able to restrict what the computer's owner can do with the machine or the information thereon. Keep in mind that also, a computer's owner (as far as software is concerned) is essentially whoever has physical possesion of the machine.
The Army could use TPM to ensure that even if a machine is stolen physically or owned by malware, its software and information can be kept safe.
On-grid solar also has an advantage: You can just use a grid-tie inverter, instead of a regular inverter, charge controller, and batteries. Not having to buy (and maintain, and replace) batteries is quite the money savings.
Downside: Your solar isn't giving you any power while the grid is down, even if it's sunny.
Because the BBB is a trade association, they really don't have any power over anyone but their members. The collection of complaint stats on non-members is helpful, though, to people who check beforehand, and to find patterns indicating scamsters (who'd get handed off to the state AG or the FTC.
They can and will revoke a member's membership if complaints don't get resolved (note that this doesn't mean "resolved in the customer's favor", though). That's the only leverage the BBB has over members.
They're non-profit, and there are a lot of members, most of whom pay the same or similar amounts for their membership. Therefore, the BBB doesn't need to bend over backwards for any particular member.
They always refer people to the state Attorney General for fraud complaints, and for illegal scams (postal foreign lotteries, etc.) The AG is the one with the power to lay the smackdown on the company.
Don't know about the author, but personally I'm "outrage fatigued". If I actually felt outrage at all the things I don't like (see: pretty much any YRO article, standard corporate behavior, etc.) I'd never be able to do anything else but pound on stuff while sobbing.
Adapting an old joke:
Mirror: "I can see you, and so can Jesus!"
Burglar: "Who cares, you're just a mirror."
Mirror: "Maybe, but Jesus is a rottweiler!"
This is basically what I think the cause of OSS's better reliability is.
In my opinion, it's not so much the personalities, it's the lack of commercial taint. When was the last time an OSS project released something half-done to make quarterly numbers look better?
Raleigh, NC.
We occasionally get grazed by hurricanes, though big damage is rare (since Fran in 1996). We see snow once or twice a winter, and, when it does snow, the whole city shuts down. No measurable civil unrest at least since I've been here (1998).
See the movie "Antitrust" for a way that spy-cams can be turned into the equivalent of a network tap (spoiler follows):
In that movie, the Big Evil Pacific Northwest Software Company was stealing code from independent developers. Nobody figured out how, because these people "had the best firewalls". Turned out that the evil corp planted cameras in those developers' workspaces, watching their screens.I don't think this is possible given U.S. corporate practices or the market for software. My day job talked about trying to shoot for long-term success, but of course they're still fighting short-term fires (layoff when a customer has a bad quarter, stage releases to get something barely working out the door, keep cutting test time, etc.) Don't know whether they were really going to do it and failed, or whether they were just telling the engineers what they wanted to hear.
Since neither your company or your customers can think long-term, your company will just lose all of its business if it tries to do things right. Of course, there may be customers out there that both demand quality software and are willing to pay more and/or wait for it. I'd love to see some examples.
It takes things getting bad enough so that enough people to successfully carry out a revolution are willing to risk near-certain death.
I doubt anyone reading ./ has a bad enough daily life that they'd be willing to take up arms against the world's largest army.
It might seem like any non-violent ways of effecting change that benefits regular people are dead in the U.S. I personally think the electoral system is not quite dead yet: