Obviously the world is still a war torn mess.. but we haven't seen any world war level conflicts in a while. The major powers all know it’s essentially impossible to fight a conventional war with each other without resulting to nuclear weapons at the end and the eventual destruction of both parties. The cold war was fought in proxy for this reason (and even then people were scared.. I personally believe Korea was all about testing the whole "can we fight without nukes" thing.. ).
The trade off is of course the constant fear of complete annihilation from some lunatic leader or fanatic group..
so there's no way they find out the word "secure" was present in that sentence
Indeed.. and even if they do happen to glance across the word in their panic.. as said it actually makes things worse! Any sentence about security, even one confirming something is secure, will scare a user (which I guess was the point of my knee-jerk post).
On a serious note, we as a community all understand this problem.. but none of us (myself included) have figured out a good way to deal with it. Maybe we should just introduce randomness in our applications to get users used to the concept that different doesn't always mean broken!
There's an argument that mass vaccination of a populating is largely responsible for making those risks low.. which is reasonable. If most people are vaccinated, the disease can’t spread to a point where catching it would become statistically significant.
In other words, deciding something is a low risk, then using that decision as a basis to eliminate the thing making it a low risk, might turn it back into a medium or high risk!
(I doubt that would happen.. as we aren’t talking about a large number of people refusing vaccinations here.. but it’s still a thought).
On one hand, I think parents should be able to chose what is best for their children. Doctors and the medical community have been wrong before, and while I doubt that is the case here, I don't think parents should be forced to submit to whatever the doctor says.
On the other hand, parents are making decisions which are very likely not in their childs best interest, which isn't fair to the kid (and arguably, not fair to other kids/people/society in general in this case).
I'm not a parent or a doctor, so at least my opinion on this is largely irrelevant.
To be honest, I really don't think it was every about that.
The messures are hillariously ineffective and illogical. I know it's been beaten to death, but the whole point of these messures was to re-assure the public, not actually make anything safer. All the messures are designed to be highly visible... with stuff that might actually be effective but would not be seen by the public not really focused on.
That can be defined so broadly, that it would definitely suppress a lot of speech.
In principle, yes (although it's defined in a little more detail in the actual criminal code..).. in practice, I've never heard of hate speech laws being used to surpress anything outside of Westboro Church type stuff.
It might not be politically correct, but you shouldn't run afoul the law for your opinions no matter what they are....
In principle I agree with this.. I recognize that to have the ability to say anything I want to say no matter how unpopular it is, others have to have the same. In practice, as I said, I've never seen the laws we have abused, and seeing some of the shit that goes on down in the US (again.. Westboro Church).. I can live with the compromise.
As I understand it, you have defamation laws down there as well.
We have "freedom of expression" here in Canada, which is kinda sorta the same thing (watered down a bit with some not too unreasonable provisions). You can still get in trouble for saying stuff that is wrong, that you havn't made reasonable attempts to verify, and is harmful.
We let politicians get away with it in parliment so they can talk freely without worrying about a civil suit every time they open their mouth.
My experience is non-technically inclined people tend to associate different with bad. When an email shows up and has a different colored title, or a weird symbol, or a dialog pops up asking them something about keyrings... they freak out and get nervous (especially if they see words like "security").
More importantly, most users don't care about this stuff. It's not intuitive for them to think "oh, this means I can be reasonable sure thsi email hasn't been tampered with and was actually sent by this person (or someone with access to their PC)".
The problem is to be successful for the masses, PGP would have to have immediate widespread adoption in email clients, which isn't going to happen.
Once he's convinced his bank, health care provider, and generally everyone outside an extremely small group of people of this.. he'll be all set! (well, except that this doesn't really protect against the new owner killing his email service outright either).
(All kidding aside, it's a lost cause. PGP isn't simple enough for the masses, doesn't work well with the whole webmail thing (aka how just about everyone access their email these days), and in the few cases where it works, ironically makes non-geeks more nervous (why does this email say something about security, am I being hacked!!!).
Disclaimer: I have no experience in this situation this is just my take on this so take with lots of salt (well.. try and keep it under 1500ml if you are watching your sodium.. )
I’d move the site to a new domain name owned by the new guy, keep the current domain name, and just set up a friendly redirect page (with an appropriate explanation to users).
Eventually people/search engines will learn the new domain name (and even if they don’t.. keeping the redirect up forever is probably nothing) and you can start migrating to a new email address while keeping the old domain name “just in case”.
If other people have email accounts or rely on other services on the current domain... then it gets more complicated.
Also I’d personally like to thank you for asking a question that is:
- non-trivial - can benefit from the vast amount of diversity and experience within the slashdot crowd - will probably generate interesting stories - and most importantly, isn’t depressing as hell nor a reminder that everything is falling apart in our industry
This is what "ask slashdot" could be! We really need more of this!
I think we see this use so prevalently because it’s quick and cheap. Most business-calculation type stuff revolves around taking tables of numbers, doing calculations, and producing other tables of numbers / graphs. Excel gives you most of that right out of the box. Throw in a little VBA and you can do in an hour what would take a month to do properly.
Even I’ll admit to using spreadsheets from time to time for things that really deserved a proper app.
Don't get me wrong, I agree wiki markup and the interface they built around it is just painful to use and needs to be cleaned up or completely replaced.. but I don't think it was driving people away (certainly not in any comparable way to the real problems).
I didn't excplicitly say "open source" or "for linux" so that's fair.
For that matter, there's lots of proprietary options for windows and I assume mac. Just doesn't seem to be a decent open source one.
Probably like audocad.. making one is just such a pain in the ass, and not enough users want it, and can easily be run in a virtual machine when needed.. that we probably won't see a decent open source visio clone.
Visio has long been one of the programs for which there is no satisfying substitute.
Indeed. I run a windows VM just to use visio. There really is nothing decent out there (and use of dia for any length of time is bad for your sanity) that even comes close.
Was like when wikipedia came out saying the reason they were losing contributors was the editing interface was too complicated.
Although I have seen some terrifying excel workbooks.. maybe there are some corporations on the fence about open source, and the ability to have their entire employee management system contained in a spreadsheet was a sticking point.
Even using a different window manager (I use a combination of openbox and xfce), you find software written for either kde or gnome can be a pain, because it expects a certain environment (kde is really bad for this.. ). It's unfortunate because while I dislike kde as a whole, a lot of the kde software is great.. but more and more you try to use it and get "this not running" or worse, a whole bunch of random processes started in the background which then do all kinds of weird stuff (like mess with my audio setup...).
It feels like we are going backwards. We had big monolithic apps.. then people realized it was better to split things apart and make them run independantly with well defined common interfaces to communicate with each other.. and now we are going right back to big "all in one, everything tied together" type software.
* brought on board in <some liquid container>, that
I know this is my fault for not looking at the preview, but come on.. how hard would it be to check if the stuff between the < and > looks valid and warn if not (or just auto correct). They have to be checking anyway because it's filtering to a small set of acceptable tags!
If they could figure out a way to do that which wouldn't have severe health reprocussions.. I'd be all for that.
Also, I don't think it's not so much a fear issue as a political risk issue. If they start letting people take liquids on the plane.. and someone actually _does_ blow up a plane with something they brought on board in, that politicians career is over. Politically it's pretty damn risky to undo these kind of decisions for this reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the world is still a war torn mess.. but we haven't seen any world war level conflicts in a while. The major powers all know it’s essentially impossible to fight a conventional war with each other without resulting to nuclear weapons at the end and the eventual destruction of both parties. The cold war was fought in proxy for this reason (and even then people were scared.. I personally believe Korea was all about testing the whole "can we fight without nukes" thing.. ).
The trade off is of course the constant fear of complete annihilation from some lunatic leader or fanatic group..
FACT-based health
Facts are only true until they are found to be not so true.
You'd probably be called a "7'th grade dropout" for being concerned about asbestos in the 40's.
(for the record I think vaccinations are perfectly safe based on the current information, but I don't blindly assume that will always be the case).
So I got woosh-ed :(
so there's no way they find out the word "secure" was present in that sentence
Indeed.. and even if they do happen to glance across the word in their panic.. as said it actually makes things worse! Any sentence about security, even one confirming something is secure, will scare a user (which I guess was the point of my knee-jerk post).
On a serious note, we as a community all understand this problem.. but none of us (myself included) have figured out a good way to deal with it. Maybe we should just introduce randomness in our applications to get users used to the concept that different doesn't always mean broken!
There's an argument that mass vaccination of a populating is largely responsible for making those risks low.. which is reasonable. If most people are vaccinated, the disease can’t spread to a point where catching it would become statistically significant.
In other words, deciding something is a low risk, then using that decision as a basis to eliminate the thing making it a low risk, might turn it back into a medium or high risk!
(I doubt that would happen.. as we aren’t talking about a large number of people refusing vaccinations here.. but it’s still a thought).
I'm always torn on this kind of stuff.
On one hand, I think parents should be able to chose what is best for their children. Doctors and the medical community have been wrong before, and while I doubt that is the case here, I don't think parents should be forced to submit to whatever the doctor says.
On the other hand, parents are making decisions which are very likely not in their childs best interest, which isn't fair to the kid (and arguably, not fair to other kids/people/society in general in this case).
I'm not a parent or a doctor, so at least my opinion on this is largely irrelevant.
To be honest, I really don't think it was every about that.
The messures are hillariously ineffective and illogical. I know it's been beaten to death, but the whole point of these messures was to re-assure the public, not actually make anything safer. All the messures are designed to be highly visible... with stuff that might actually be effective but would not be seen by the public not really focused on.
That's actually pretty impressive.
Thanks!
That can be defined so broadly, that it would definitely suppress a lot of speech.
In principle, yes (although it's defined in a little more detail in the actual criminal code..).. in practice, I've never heard of hate speech laws being used to surpress anything outside of Westboro Church type stuff.
It might not be politically correct, but you shouldn't run afoul the law for your opinions no matter what they are....
In principle I agree with this.. I recognize that to have the ability to say anything I want to say no matter how unpopular it is, others have to have the same. In practice, as I said, I've never seen the laws we have abused, and seeing some of the shit that goes on down in the US (again.. Westboro Church) .. I can live with the compromise.
As I understand it, you have defamation laws down there as well.
We have "freedom of expression" here in Canada, which is kinda sorta the same thing (watered down a bit with some not too unreasonable provisions). You can still get in trouble for saying stuff that is wrong, that you havn't made reasonable attempts to verify, and is harmful.
We let politicians get away with it in parliment so they can talk freely without worrying about a civil suit every time they open their mouth.
Actually it's the opposite!
My experience is non-technically inclined people tend to associate different with bad. When an email shows up and has a different colored title, or a weird symbol, or a dialog pops up asking them something about keyrings ... they freak out and get nervous (especially if they see words like "security").
More importantly, most users don't care about this stuff. It's not intuitive for them to think "oh, this means I can be reasonable sure thsi email hasn't been tampered with and was actually sent by this person (or someone with access to their PC)".
The problem is to be successful for the masses, PGP would have to have immediate widespread adoption in email clients, which isn't going to happen.
Sounds reasonable.
Once he's convinced his bank, health care provider, and generally everyone outside an extremely small group of people of this.. he'll be all set! (well, except that this doesn't really protect against the new owner killing his email service outright either).
(All kidding aside, it's a lost cause. PGP isn't simple enough for the masses, doesn't work well with the whole webmail thing (aka how just about everyone access their email these days), and in the few cases where it works, ironically makes non-geeks more nervous (why does this email say something about security, am I being hacked!!!).
Disclaimer: I have no experience in this situation this is just my take on this so take with lots of salt (well.. try and keep it under 1500ml if you are watching your sodium.. )
I’d move the site to a new domain name owned by the new guy, keep the current domain name, and just set up a friendly redirect page (with an appropriate explanation to users).
Eventually people/search engines will learn the new domain name (and even if they don’t.. keeping the redirect up forever is probably nothing) and you can start migrating to a new email address while keeping the old domain name “just in case”.
If other people have email accounts or rely on other services on the current domain... then it gets more complicated.
Also I’d personally like to thank you for asking a question that is:
- non-trivial
- can benefit from the vast amount of diversity and experience within the slashdot crowd
- will probably generate interesting stories
- and most importantly, isn’t depressing as hell nor a reminder that everything is falling apart in our industry
This is what "ask slashdot" could be! We really need more of this!
I think we see this use so prevalently because it’s quick and cheap. Most business-calculation type stuff revolves around taking tables of numbers, doing calculations, and producing other tables of numbers / graphs. Excel gives you most of that right out of the box. Throw in a little VBA and you can do in an hour what would take a month to do properly.
Even I’ll admit to using spreadsheets from time to time for things that really deserved a proper app.
Indeed.
Don't get me wrong, I agree wiki markup and the interface they built around it is just painful to use and needs to be cleaned up or completely replaced.. but I don't think it was driving people away (certainly not in any comparable way to the real problems).
I didn't excplicitly say "open source" or "for linux" so that's fair.
For that matter, there's lots of proprietary options for windows and I assume mac. Just doesn't seem to be a decent open source one.
Probably like audocad.. making one is just such a pain in the ass, and not enough users want it, and can easily be run in a virtual machine when needed.. that we probably won't see a decent open source visio clone.
Kinda different areas of use...
If you are using visio for scientific modeling.. you have every right to be bitter!
Visio has long been one of the programs for which there is no satisfying substitute.
Indeed. I run a windows VM just to use visio. There really is nothing decent out there (and use of dia for any length of time is bad for your sanity) that even comes close.
Haha, yeah.. had the same thought.
Was like when wikipedia came out saying the reason they were losing contributors was the editing interface was too complicated.
Although I have seen some terrifying excel workbooks .. maybe there are some corporations on the fence about open source, and the ability to have their entire employee management system contained in a spreadsheet was a sticking point.
And they'd want to avoid having it be given an R rating to maximize profits..
Oh.. God..
It would probably be turned into a romantic comedy :S
Even using a different window manager (I use a combination of openbox and xfce), you find software written for either kde or gnome can be a pain, because it expects a certain environment (kde is really bad for this.. ). It's unfortunate because while I dislike kde as a whole, a lot of the kde software is great.. but more and more you try to use it and get "this not running" or worse, a whole bunch of random processes started in the background which then do all kinds of weird stuff (like mess with my audio setup...).
It feels like we are going backwards. We had big monolithic apps.. then people realized it was better to split things apart and make them run independantly with well defined common interfaces to communicate with each other.. and now we are going right back to big "all in one, everything tied together" type software.
There was supposed to be a <some liquid container> in there.. but slashdot took my words :(
Then the politician expresses his sadness over the incident and announces (probably to much applause) plans to make airport security even tighter.
But if they stopped the TSA groping and this happened.. they'd be calling for the head of the guy who made that decision!
We are talking politics here, not logic.
Also..
* brought on board in <some liquid container>, that
I know this is my fault for not looking at the preview, but come on.. how hard would it be to check if the stuff between the < and > looks valid and warn if not (or just auto correct). They have to be checking anyway because it's filtering to a small set of acceptable tags!
I don't think it's not so much
Augh.. *face palm*
If they could figure out a way to do that which wouldn't have severe health reprocussions.. I'd be all for that.
Also, I don't think it's not so much a fear issue as a political risk issue. If they start letting people take liquids on the plane.. and someone actually _does_ blow up a plane with something they brought on board in, that politicians career is over. Politically it's pretty damn risky to undo these kind of decisions for this reason.