this is about not having the supplies that directly contribute to your child's education
We have one of the highest per-student education spending rates in the world, and yet so little of that money ends up going where it's actually needed -- to competent teachers and classroom supplies.
D.C. spent about $13,400 per student in 2006, which was only exceeded by New York and New Jersey.
Despite the city's high per-student spending, scores on math and reading were the lowest in the country last year, according to results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.
To make matters worse, less than half of that money is actually going to instruction; most of it goes to administration, with 14 administrators raking in at least $150,000 per year.
And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement.
Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved... We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."
He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.
Much of the money never makes it to our children; instead it goes to tenured incompetents who only bother to show up to work for the paycheck, useless bureaucrats, and other waste.
World's highest per-student spending rates, and yet our teachers can't afford to make photocopies. How the hell did we get here?
If you took the current ISP business model to any other industry you'd be laughed out of town, yet they get away with it.
Cough...fractional reserve banking...cough
Similarly, overselling is also common in shared web hosting (e.g. dreamhost and all the other $5/month hosting services) and telephone service. While nearly all cell plans allow for "unlimited night and weekend" calling (and some now even offer "unlimited everything"), and many POTS services allow for "unlimited local calling", were people to try to use these services for 100% of the time they theoretically could, we'd find that existing infrastructure wouldn't even remotely be able to handle it.
Experience matters, as does intelligence, attitude and aptitude.
If you can say you have the experience that someone older has, as well as the attitude and aptitude of the older applicant, then you are equal, if you don't have that experience, attitude or aptitude, then you aren't, it's as simple as that.
It's not age discrimination, it's making a decision weighted on key factors that mean more than any education.
That's all good and fine. The problem is that the OP expressed all of this in terms of age, not experience:
it's probably fair to say the more mature applicants will get a more sympathetic hearing from me than they might from most other interviewers for IT roles. The question is, what do I ask older applicants to get them to demonstrate the value of their experience? My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?'
Replace that with "more experienced", "more experienced applicants", and "has 15 years less experience than you", and we're fine. But the repeated emphasis on age is illegal, and immoral.
Honestly, I think the OP has his heart in the right place, he just needs to mentally divorce the concepts of experience and age.
You didn't provide any suggestions to solve the problem, just banged on about how important it is to learn that there is a problem. Do you have any ideas on how to fix this? Or is just understanding that it's a massive problem good enough for you?
The purpose of my post was only to assert the importance of the article. And yes, I do think making sure new MMO developers understand the problem is "enough". If you're aware of the rate at which users will tear through content, and plan accordingly, you'll be in better shape than if you learn this lesson by personal experience.
A discussion of how to address this issue was out of the scope of my original post, but since you asked so nicely...
The problem is twofold. The first problem is the scope of quest design -- quests are designed for individuals and small groups of semi-casual players to solve, but inevitably, there will be large, well coordinated groups with more in-game resources and time at their disposal attempting the same quests -- and they'll inevitably accomplish it in an instant. A goal accomplishable by your more casual players is trivial for your hardcore players; similarly, a challenging goal for your hardcore players is completely inaccessible to your casual players.
The second part of the problem is creation of static content is time consuming. It takes months to create a few days worth of content. While the quest-development-time to quest-completion-time ratio can be tweaked to some extent, you'll never, ever be able to create content faster than your players can conquer it.
There are several ways to cope with this:
Just accept it, and design for your casual players. Your hardcore players will chew through your content rapidly. Either they get a real kick out of being the first to accomplish goals, and won't mind, or they'll leave for more hardcore oriented games (EVE online?). There's nothing all that wrong with this approach, and it's likely the most financially viable option
Design for your hardcore players. Change the "Kill 5 elk" quest to "Kill 500 elk". This will inevitably drive your casual players to easier games (WoW). Your shareholders probably won't be very fond of this choice, but if you're not out for big profits, this is potentially a viable option
Design quests to be taken on by the whole server. WoW's opening of the Dark Portal is a good example of this, as is ATITD. ATITD features a technology advancement track that requires all of the game's players to band together to donate massive amounts of game resources to research. The rewards are then available to all players -- much like all players were able to use the Dark Portal. Everyone who pitches in gets a small sense of accomplishment.
Abandon static content for dynamic. Dynamically created worlds are not a new idea -- one of the best known examples is 1984's Elite. However, applying this concept to multiplayer games represents a hell of a challenge. Building an MMO is enough of a technical challenge to begin with; making it actually *fun* makes it even harder, and making a procedurally generated world fun for players with diverse levels of interest is a challenge that no one's yet accomplished. There have been attempts, however.
Let players create content for each other. This is the Second Life/Metaplace approach. As mentioned previously, the problem with the standard MMO model, is millions of players are playing content created by a few dozen developers on a budget. If you can get your millions of users to start creating content for each other, you'll potentially have far more content available to your users than you could have ever created yourself.
Please keep me informed whenever anyone else makes it to level 80, I really don't want to miss any of their important in game breakthroughs.
Stuff that matters, indeed.
This actually represents a very important (albeit not new) lesson to MMO developers: you can spend months designing new content, but players will grind through much of it in hours or days, regardless.
It's *very* important for fledgling MMO designers to understand that. Many times, single-player and small-scale multiplayer game designers have built elaborate quests that would have taken a week to solve in a single player game, only to find that players solve them in hours. When you design content for an MMO, it's not you, the designer, versus 10,000 individuals, it's you the designer versus a few large and relatively well coordinated mobs.
Failure to understand that is grounds for major disappointment for all involved.
Of course, massively multiplayer gaming has been around in one form or another for at least two decades now (if you define "massively" as more than about 100), so this lesson is not a new one, but it never hurts to reinforce it, especially as the MMO market continues to grow, and this particular lesson continues to prove true for larger and larger games.
My mother works at a bank and she has to talk people out of these scams on a regular basis, and refuses to deposit the obviously fake checks. It's almost unbelievable how convinced these people are that it's not a scam.
My wife said the same thing, during her brief stint as a teller a little over a year ago. The "You've won the Irish Loto! Just send us $4,500 to cover taxes" scam was pretty popular as well. Every time, she'd ask, "Now, did you *enter* the Irish Lottery? No? Well, you really can't win if you don't enter, can you?"
mod_security is a reactive security measure. It's blacklist based, which makes the classic error of attempting to "enumerate badness".
While it's great if you've identified an existing threat to an application you cannot properly secure, it does nothing to protect you against future attacks using less obvious techniques.
mod_security alone is not an adequate solution. It's still necessary to proactively write secure applications in the first place, which means making sure you're never allowing raw, unfiltered/unescaped user data into places where it shouldn't go.
why is it so "tragic" these days if someone is single?
I believe the "moral" imperative to "be fruitful and multiply" comes from a desire of certain subgroups (mostly religious and ethnic in nature) to grow themselves. People born in to your church/ethnic group are pretty likely to stay loyal to it.
From this simple goal come many other "moral" values: anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-homosexuality, anti-promiscuity, anti-interracial marriage, and anti-singlehood.
However, the world in which these values formed is very different from the world we know today. A few centuries ago, with high infant and childhood mortality, a much higher birthrate was necessary to produce enough adults of childbearing age (the extra hands on the farm helped too).
Today, childhood mortality is incredibly low meaning most children make it to child-bearing age. The threat of overpopulation, rather than extinction, is now looming. Additionally, birth control dramatically alters the consequences of sex.
Our moral values are only slowly catching up, hence the intense clashes over abortion and homosexuality.
In short, being single is "bad" because we still have yet to shed some antiquated moral beliefs that aren't nearly as applicable in the modern world as they once were.
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list.
Where windows flounders and linux shines, is with non-current drivers.
I pulled an old voodoo 3 out of an an ancient PC. It was pretty trivial to get debian to recognize it, but after hours of searching, I never found a functional windows XP driver.
but it would be nice to see a whole game based on just the evolution of The Beatles' music.
No, actually it wouldn't be nice to have another whole new game just for one band. What would be nice is to be able to purchase and download individual songs at a reasonable price. The AC/DC version of Rock Band costs $40 for 18 songs, and you can't buy individual songs - it's all or nothing. This shit has gotta stop.
According to WP track packs exist ONLY for the platforms that don't support downloads: PS2 and Wii. And they retail for $30, not $40. If you have an xbox360 or PS3, you can download the tracks in question as you please.
There's not really any way around it. A track pack like that takes several hundred meg to store. That sort of storage isn't really available for the PS2 and Wii. Either the Wii and PS2 get these "track pack" discs... or they get no content additional content at all.
Don't like it? Don't buy 'em, or buy a console with real storage.
There's a serious secondary market for those things. I used to work for a used book merchant. We had a half dozen of 'em, and used 'em to scan ISBN bar codes on the books we received for quick cataloging.
You can pick up a "declawed" CueCat for $10. Most better barcode scanners *start* at $60.
Honestly, I don't 3x damages really make the risk/reward ratio enough to buy legitimately for anyone. The current 30,000x or so are way out of whack on the other end of things, but if you plan to deter piracy through lawsuits, you have to make people believe that they'll come out ahead financially by purchasing. There's no way to have a one in three chance of getting sued.
If a law is being violated so often by otherwise law-abiding citizens that you cannot conceivably enforce the law against even a third of them, then maybe there's something wrong with the law.
Hmmmm. And Sarah Palin's $150,000 was also good fiscal prudence, too?
She's a public figure that is engaging in the mother of all popularity contests. Like it or not, appearance makes a HUGE difference to the American people. That $150,000 is an investment in her campaign plain and simple. If she stood up there in K-mart clothes people would have perceived her as less sophisticated.
Essentially, consider it part of the advertising budget. When you're trying to sell yourself to a nation packaging is important.You're absolutely right. That's what running for office has become, and we shouldn't be appalled at those playing the game for playing by the rules.
However, we absolutely should be appalled that this is how our leaders are now chosen. Not on merit as a leader, but on popular appeal.
The construction and maintenance of a fighter jet is one of the more labour intensive things you can buy. So I look at this as a large transfer of money from the rich guys to working people... Flying toys are one of the worlds best wealth re-distributors. Small numbers of ridiculously wealthy middle eastern princes and other "principles" keep our team of engineers and techies employed, not to mention a whole raft of suppliers. And then you have to include all the people who work for airframe OEMs.
To play the devil's advocate, sure, purchases like these stimulate the "rich people's toys" industry, but at the same time, a kid who throws a rock through a window does the same for the glass industry... by diverting funds that would have gone elsewhere. Sure, Saudi princes are keeping you employed, but were it not for them, surely you'd find work elsewhere -- perhaps, to take a leap, building more efficient turbines for cleaner power generation.
If you take a step back for a moment, and recognize that a decent amount of human labor is dedicated solely to satisfying the whims of the rich, it seems just a bit wasteful. Why are we, the peasants, working the fields year-round just so the nobles can feast? Wouldn't society as a whole be better off if our labor went to support need, rather than excess?
Of course, the rich *do* offer a service to society, don't they? Would we have google and Windows and databases were it not for Brin, Page, Gates, and Ellison? Should we except these mens extravagances as a necessary price society pays for their unparalleled leadership?
The answer really depends on which schools of philosophy, politics, and economics you subscribe to.
The "theft-must-equal-loss-of-property" argument is specifically addressing the accusation that copyright violation is the legal equivalent of theft of goods, or shoplifting.
The examples you provide are examples of theft of services.
"Theft of services", theft of goods, and copyright violation are all distinct concepts. Theft of services deprives the service provider of the time they took to provide that service.
When my friend emails me an MP3, the original creator of that MP3 does not provide a service. The creator doesn't even have to be *alive*, much less provide a service.
Just because the number is higher doesn't mean it's 'better'. RAID levels are to be chosen based on what (performance, size, redundancy) is specifically required. One size most definitely does not fit all. RAID 10 is really just RAID 1+0 anyway, which is to say a stripe of mirrors.
Of course. But the article specifically deals with fault tolerance, and RAID 10 will be more fault tolerant than RAID 5 -- especially with respect to the failure mode discussed in TFA.
That was what I was trying to get at: for installations where this issue actually matters, migration to a more fault-tolerant RAID configuration is an easy, albeit somewhat costly solution. This isn't an "Oh no, RAID 5 is useless, we have no other options!" moment. Options have been available for years.
But even today a 7 drive RAID 5 with 1 TB disks has a 50% chance of a rebuild failure. RAID 5 is reaching the end of its useful life.
This is trivially testable. Any slashdotters have experience rebuilding 7TB RAID 5 arrays?
You'd think, if this were really an issue, we'd be hearing stories from the front lines of this happening with increasing frequency. Instead we have a blog post based entirely on theory, without a single real-world example for corroboration.
What's more, who even uses RAID 5 anymore? I thought it was all RAID 10 and whatnot these days.
In college the biggest pirates I knew were the guys who had enough money to buy most of what they got illegally. It never even phased them that they were often pirating the works of small bands that needed every penny that they could get.. I swear, it's like a bunch of rich kids crying about exploitation, while they shop at the Gap and A&F.
That's quite a strawman you've assembled there. Pirates are all just spoiled little rich kids, eh?
While there are a few of those, pirates come in many varieties. Some are young adults working full time at near-minimum wage to put themselves through school. Some are married with kids. Some *are* children. They're your friends, family, and neighbors. Rich, poor, young, old, spoiled, starving... They're everywhere, and everyone.
Get all of this copyright infringement and DRM bullshit out of the picture and start hitting them with theft charges.
Need we differentiate theft from copyright violation yet again? Putting everyone who download an MP3 in jail is just absurd. The punishment does not fit the crime.
When you steal something, the owner is deprived of a physical good. They have less. When you violate copyright, the owner does not experience loss. And no, not every copyright violation is a "lost sale".
Even were this idea seen through, file sharing would just become even more anonymous. The technology is already here. The only thing stopping adoption of even harder-to-trace protocols is the lack of real consequences for using the current, widely adopted ones. Should the consequences increase, darknets will become the p2p mechanism of choice overnight, and prosecution will become nigh impossible.
The file sharing cat is out of the bag, and no amount of legal strong arming will ever stuff it back in.
This is stupid. I think the most insane thing about any laptop is easy harddrive removal. It screams of a manufacturer that is going to save money using defective harddrives since they will be so easy to replace.
Or, you know, they're aware that harddrives follow the moore's law curve closely, and users frequently want to upgrade them.
I replaced the harddrive in my macbook, not because the old one failed, but because I just couldn't stand working with only 80 gig of space on a dual-booting machine anymore. I got a 250 gig drive for about $150. 18 months ago, when I bought the macbook, there was no such thing as a 2.5" 250 gig 7200 RPM drive. And if this thing's still kicking in another 3 years (which it may well be), I'll probably stick a 1.0 TB drive in it, which will cost about $100 by then.
But why in the world would anyone want a hard drive that could be stolen in 30 seconds.
No matter how difficult you make removing the drive, it only takes 3 seconds to just walk off with the whole laptop, much less the drive.
know from experience that the 12" powerbook is insane, and the Apple designer that did that should be flogged. Hard drives do fail, so one should not have to disassemble the whole machine to fix a part that is not likely to last the lifetime of the machine.
Wow, there's no satisfying you, is there? If it's hard to remove, it's too hard, and if it's easy, it's too easy.
Yeah, the important questions are: How large is the set of possible answers, and how easy is it for an attacker to reduce the size of that set?
If you ask a yes/no question, no matter *how* difficult the question, a random guess will be correct 50% of the time. No AI necessary.
For your solution, provided you can identify the names in the sentence (which should be pretty trivial), a program that guesses a random pair of names from the list of 6 you provide will be correct 1 time in 30, or a bit over 3% of the time (1 in 6 guess for the first, 1 in 5 for the second name).
That's not a great success rate, but it's enough that a spammer could still successfully complete your registration process hundreds of times a day.
On the other hand, random guesses against a simple 4 character, alphanumeric captcha only succeed 1 in 1.6 million times (36 ^ 4).
I've read that the dual GPUs are a power saving feature. The weaker GPU runs boring desktop stuff, and the stronger GPU takes over for heavy lifting -- 3D games, etc.
Makes sense. High-end GPUs are power hogs. I suppose, ideally, NVidia would start adding power saving modes to them, but until then, we have this hybrid situation.
I also read that some Sony Vaio models has had a similar feature for a while.
One would think that continually prying for personal experiences would reveal a flaw. Or perhaps simple things like "when were you born?" Followed by "how did you feel when JFK was assassinated?" if they weren't born before 1963.
When were you born? Early in the morning. In what year were you born? I was born in 1984. How did you feel when JFK was assassinated? About the war? Where were you when JFK was assassinated? The question is where were you? Where were you when JFK was assassinated? I wasn't even born. What about you ?
Not bad. Not knowing how the bot operates, I can't guess at how it managed to answer consistently (albeit evasively).
I tried a slightly different approach: asking absurd, self-contradictory questions. That didn't go quite as well.
Is it possible to be completely nude while wearing clothes? I don't know. Is it possible to be friends with a potato spud? Is it possible to be completely nude while wearing clothes? I hope so, because I have no friends. Is it possible to be completely nude while wearing clothes? Are you calling me spud or is there such a thing as a 'potato spud?'. Could Jesus Christ microwave a burrito so hot, that not even he could eat it? Why did the chicken cross the road? Could Jesus Christ microwave a burrito so hot, that not even he could eat it? That's not a colour! Could Jesus Christ microwave a burrito so hot, that not even he could eat it? Why start over?
Seems like evasiveness is the #1 sign you're talking to a bot.
Slashdot Mirror
We have one of the highest per-student education spending rates in the world, and yet so little of that money ends up going where it's actually needed -- to competent teachers and classroom supplies.
D.C., specifically, is an amazing example of waste:
To make matters worse, less than half of that money is actually going to instruction; most of it goes to administration, with 14 administrators raking in at least $150,000 per year.
We've doubled education spending but test scores haven't improved at all:
Much of the money never makes it to our children; instead it goes to tenured incompetents who only bother to show up to work for the paycheck, useless bureaucrats, and other waste.
World's highest per-student spending rates, and yet our teachers can't afford to make photocopies. How the hell did we get here?
Similarly, overselling is also common in shared web hosting (e.g. dreamhost and all the other $5/month hosting services) and telephone service. While nearly all cell plans allow for "unlimited night and weekend" calling (and some now even offer "unlimited everything"), and many POTS services allow for "unlimited local calling", were people to try to use these services for 100% of the time they theoretically could, we'd find that existing infrastructure wouldn't even remotely be able to handle it.
Hell, airlines and hotels overbook all the time.
Sorry, grandparent post, but overselling is in no way unique to ISPs.
That's all good and fine. The problem is that the OP expressed all of this in terms of age, not experience:
Replace that with "more experienced", "more experienced applicants", and "has 15 years less experience than you", and we're fine. But the repeated emphasis on age is illegal, and immoral.
Honestly, I think the OP has his heart in the right place, he just needs to mentally divorce the concepts of experience and age.
The purpose of my post was only to assert the importance of the article. And yes, I do think making sure new MMO developers understand the problem is "enough". If you're aware of the rate at which users will tear through content, and plan accordingly, you'll be in better shape than if you learn this lesson by personal experience.
A discussion of how to address this issue was out of the scope of my original post, but since you asked so nicely...
The problem is twofold. The first problem is the scope of quest design -- quests are designed for individuals and small groups of semi-casual players to solve, but inevitably, there will be large, well coordinated groups with more in-game resources and time at their disposal attempting the same quests -- and they'll inevitably accomplish it in an instant. A goal accomplishable by your more casual players is trivial for your hardcore players; similarly, a challenging goal for your hardcore players is completely inaccessible to your casual players.
The second part of the problem is creation of static content is time consuming. It takes months to create a few days worth of content. While the quest-development-time to quest-completion-time ratio can be tweaked to some extent, you'll never, ever be able to create content faster than your players can conquer it.
There are several ways to cope with this:
This actually represents a very important (albeit not new) lesson to MMO developers: you can spend months designing new content, but players will grind through much of it in hours or days, regardless.
It's *very* important for fledgling MMO designers to understand that. Many times, single-player and small-scale multiplayer game designers have built elaborate quests that would have taken a week to solve in a single player game, only to find that players solve them in hours. When you design content for an MMO, it's not you, the designer, versus 10,000 individuals, it's you the designer versus a few large and relatively well coordinated mobs.
Failure to understand that is grounds for major disappointment for all involved.
Of course, massively multiplayer gaming has been around in one form or another for at least two decades now (if you define "massively" as more than about 100), so this lesson is not a new one, but it never hurts to reinforce it, especially as the MMO market continues to grow, and this particular lesson continues to prove true for larger and larger games.
My wife said the same thing, during her brief stint as a teller a little over a year ago. The "You've won the Irish Loto! Just send us $4,500 to cover taxes" scam was pretty popular as well. Every time, she'd ask, "Now, did you *enter* the Irish Lottery? No? Well, you really can't win if you don't enter, can you?"
mod_security is a reactive security measure. It's blacklist based, which makes the classic error of attempting to "enumerate badness".
While it's great if you've identified an existing threat to an application you cannot properly secure, it does nothing to protect you against future attacks using less obvious techniques.
mod_security alone is not an adequate solution. It's still necessary to proactively write secure applications in the first place, which means making sure you're never allowing raw, unfiltered/unescaped user data into places where it shouldn't go.
I believe the "moral" imperative to "be fruitful and multiply" comes from a desire of certain subgroups (mostly religious and ethnic in nature) to grow themselves. People born in to your church/ethnic group are pretty likely to stay loyal to it.
From this simple goal come many other "moral" values: anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-homosexuality, anti-promiscuity, anti-interracial marriage, and anti-singlehood.
However, the world in which these values formed is very different from the world we know today. A few centuries ago, with high infant and childhood mortality, a much higher birthrate was necessary to produce enough adults of childbearing age (the extra hands on the farm helped too).
Today, childhood mortality is incredibly low meaning most children make it to child-bearing age. The threat of overpopulation, rather than extinction, is now looming. Additionally, birth control dramatically alters the consequences of sex.
Our moral values are only slowly catching up, hence the intense clashes over abortion and homosexuality.
In short, being single is "bad" because we still have yet to shed some antiquated moral beliefs that aren't nearly as applicable in the modern world as they once were.
Where windows flounders and linux shines, is with non-current drivers.
I pulled an old voodoo 3 out of an an ancient PC. It was pretty trivial to get debian to recognize it, but after hours of searching, I never found a functional windows XP driver.
You seem to have confused people exercising their first amendment right with attacks on the first amendment.
Criticism of someone else's speech is not an attack on the first amendment. Geographically restricting free speech, on the other hand, is.
According to WP track packs exist ONLY for the platforms that don't support downloads: PS2 and Wii. And they retail for $30, not $40. If you have an xbox360 or PS3, you can download the tracks in question as you please.
There's not really any way around it. A track pack like that takes several hundred meg to store. That sort of storage isn't really available for the PS2 and Wii. Either the Wii and PS2 get these "track pack" discs... or they get no content additional content at all.
Don't like it? Don't buy 'em, or buy a console with real storage.
There's a serious secondary market for those things. I used to work for a used book merchant. We had a half dozen of 'em, and used 'em to scan ISBN bar codes on the books we received for quick cataloging.
You can pick up a "declawed" CueCat for $10. Most better barcode scanners *start* at $60.
If a law is being violated so often by otherwise law-abiding citizens that you cannot conceivably enforce the law against even a third of them, then maybe there's something wrong with the law.
Oh, good. They've gone from one unproven platform to another?
If they'd just picked a standard platform, they'd have been out of this mess over a year ago.
To play the devil's advocate, sure, purchases like these stimulate the "rich people's toys" industry, but at the same time, a kid who throws a rock through a window does the same for the glass industry... by diverting funds that would have gone elsewhere. Sure, Saudi princes are keeping you employed, but were it not for them, surely you'd find work elsewhere -- perhaps, to take a leap, building more efficient turbines for cleaner power generation.
If you take a step back for a moment, and recognize that a decent amount of human labor is dedicated solely to satisfying the whims of the rich, it seems just a bit wasteful. Why are we, the peasants, working the fields year-round just so the nobles can feast? Wouldn't society as a whole be better off if our labor went to support need, rather than excess?
Of course, the rich *do* offer a service to society, don't they? Would we have google and Windows and databases were it not for Brin, Page, Gates, and Ellison? Should we except these mens extravagances as a necessary price society pays for their unparalleled leadership?
The answer really depends on which schools of philosophy, politics, and economics you subscribe to.
The "theft-must-equal-loss-of-property" argument is specifically addressing the accusation that copyright violation is the legal equivalent of theft of goods, or shoplifting.
The examples you provide are examples of theft of services.
"Theft of services", theft of goods, and copyright violation are all distinct concepts.
Theft of services deprives the service provider of the time they took to provide that service.
When my friend emails me an MP3, the original creator of that MP3 does not provide a service. The creator doesn't even have to be *alive*, much less provide a service.
Of course. But the article specifically deals with fault tolerance, and RAID 10 will be more fault tolerant than RAID 5 -- especially with respect to the failure mode discussed in TFA.
That was what I was trying to get at: for installations where this issue actually matters, migration to a more fault-tolerant RAID configuration is an easy, albeit somewhat costly solution. This isn't an "Oh no, RAID 5 is useless, we have no other options!" moment. Options have been available for years.
This is trivially testable. Any slashdotters have experience rebuilding 7TB RAID 5 arrays?
You'd think, if this were really an issue, we'd be hearing stories from the front lines of this happening with increasing frequency. Instead we have a blog post based entirely on theory, without a single real-world example for corroboration.
What's more, who even uses RAID 5 anymore? I thought it was all RAID 10 and whatnot these days.
That's quite a strawman you've assembled there. Pirates are all just spoiled little rich kids, eh?
While there are a few of those, pirates come in many varieties. Some are young adults working full time at near-minimum wage to put themselves through school. Some are married with kids. Some *are* children. They're your friends, family, and neighbors. Rich, poor, young, old, spoiled, starving... They're everywhere, and everyone.
Need we differentiate theft from copyright violation yet again? Putting everyone who download an MP3 in jail is just absurd. The punishment does not fit the crime.
When you steal something, the owner is deprived of a physical good. They have less. When you violate copyright, the owner does not experience loss. And no, not every copyright violation is a "lost sale".
Even were this idea seen through, file sharing would just become even more anonymous. The technology is already here. The only thing stopping adoption of even harder-to-trace protocols is the lack of real consequences for using the current, widely adopted ones. Should the consequences increase, darknets will become the p2p mechanism of choice overnight, and prosecution will become nigh impossible.
The file sharing cat is out of the bag, and no amount of legal strong arming will ever stuff it back in.
Or, you know, they're aware that harddrives follow the moore's law curve closely, and users frequently want to upgrade them.
I replaced the harddrive in my macbook, not because the old one failed, but because I just couldn't stand working with only 80 gig of space on a dual-booting machine anymore. I got a 250 gig drive for about $150. 18 months ago, when I bought the macbook, there was no such thing as a 2.5" 250 gig 7200 RPM drive. And if this thing's still kicking in another 3 years (which it may well be), I'll probably stick a 1.0 TB drive in it, which will cost about $100 by then.
No matter how difficult you make removing the drive, it only takes 3 seconds to just walk off with the whole laptop, much less the drive.
Wow, there's no satisfying you, is there? If it's hard to remove, it's too hard, and if it's easy, it's too easy.
User serviceable components are a good thing.
Yeah, the important questions are:
How large is the set of possible answers, and how easy is it for an attacker to reduce the size of that set?
If you ask a yes/no question, no matter *how* difficult the question, a random guess will be correct 50% of the time. No AI necessary.
For your solution, provided you can identify the names in the sentence (which should be pretty trivial), a program that guesses a random pair of names from the list of 6 you provide will be correct 1 time in 30, or a bit over 3% of the time (1 in 6 guess for the first, 1 in 5 for the second name).
That's not a great success rate, but it's enough that a spammer could still successfully complete your registration process hundreds of times a day.
On the other hand, random guesses against a simple 4 character, alphanumeric captcha only succeed 1 in 1.6 million times (36 ^ 4).
When you put it like that, it does sound primitive, like medieval bloodletting.
I've read that the dual GPUs are a power saving feature. The weaker GPU runs boring desktop stuff, and the stronger GPU takes over for heavy lifting -- 3D games, etc.
Makes sense. High-end GPUs are power hogs. I suppose, ideally, NVidia would start adding power saving modes to them, but until then, we have this hybrid situation.
I also read that some Sony Vaio models has had a similar feature for a while.
I liked your idea, so I gave it a shot
I'm in bold, the bot's not.
Not bad. Not knowing how the bot operates, I can't guess at how it managed to answer consistently (albeit evasively).
I tried a slightly different approach: asking absurd, self-contradictory questions. That didn't go quite as well.
Seems like evasiveness is the #1 sign you're talking to a bot.