Not true.
x.com and PayPal were two different companies with two different products back in 2000.
x was a bank, PP was an on-line payment service.
By buying x.com, PayPal was able to offer debit cards and some other fun stuff they couldn't before (at least not without getting a charter as a bank, which is probably more expensive than simply buying a bank...)
I remember it well; I had an x.com debit card at the time, and I used to use both services.
Wrong. It can be as much as 40 cooler depending on the conditions. Even in 100 temperatures, I've needed to add a touch of heat to the car's AC to keep from getting too cold.
I said the A/C in your HOUSE puts out a constant temp, then went on to explain why the one in your car doesn't - which has nothing to do with turning the compressor on and off. The R-134a A/C in a car usually has a 40 degree drop.
How much do you use your defroster during the winter? Or do you leave it on full time? The defroster doesn't just send heat onto the glass, it sends dried air onto the glass, using the AC compressor to dry the air. You may actually be running your AC more during the winter than you do during the summer!
Practically never. I live in SoCal, where "winters" are still in the 60's during the day. I use the defogger maybe 10 days total during the winter months... compared to running the A/C the entire time I'm in the car during the summer.
Wrong. Modern cars, even as early as the late 70's, had an electric clutch that switched the compressor on and off depending on the load on an engine. Running 70mph down the highway might have the compressor running full time, but running 75 might switch it off to give that extra 2 horses back to the engine. Or didn't you notice that the interior got a little warm every time you started speeding?
How is that relevant? Turning the compressor off because of high engine load has nothing to do with thermostatic control.
I also calculate my mileage after every tank, so I'm well aware of my MPG trends. In short, the variations I see due to different driving habits and traffic patterns account for a lot more than using the A/C for an extra 5 minutes per trip. In fact, I've noticed BETTER cooling while the car is running at 60-70 MPH, compared to sitting in traffic. That's no surprise, since more air is flowing over the condenser coil, improving the amount of energy transferred. Since smooth traffic flow is the #1 way to improve mileage, maybe CARB should be finding ways to fix traffic problems, especially stupid engineering decisions that directly contribute to traffic problems. On my drive home, for example, there's a 2-lane merge in the middle of nowhere, and this forces everyone to drive about 25 MPh for about 5 miles. Right after the merge, traffic is back up to 65+.
What bothers me most about all this is that CARB is acting without the benefit of good science. Where are the double-blind scientific studies where someone put 1000 identical models on the road, half of which had the tint, and had people drive the same routes over a 12 month period? So far, I'm not seeing it. There are better ways to cool our cars when they're idle: the Prius's new active solar cooling is one example. Those silver window shades can help, too. Maybe CA should require all drivers to use those on hot days... leaving your shade off on a 90 day would be a $20 ticket.
No, I don't buy it. It's far more likely that either someone stands to make a profit from this or CARB is staffed by incompetent fools.
The air conditioner in your car is NOT like the one in your house. Your home's air conditioner turns on when the temperature gets too high and turns off when it gets too low. The air coming out the vents is always cooled by the same amount, roughly 20 degrees cooler than the outside air.
But the AC in your car doesn't work this way. When you turn on the AC in your car, you can set the temperature coming out the vents by changing the ratio of air fed from the evaporator coil and the car's heater coil. That's what the little Blue/Red slider does. When the little "AC" light is on, your car's air conditioner is ALWAYS WORKING, always drawing maybe 2 horsepower from your engine. That's maybe 10-15% of the power you're using at highway-speeds.
So how is this reflective glass, which may make a 5 difference, supposed to help AT ALL? Since the compressor runs all the time anyway, how is this supposed to make a difference?
And here's the thing: I see no quantifiable difference in my gas mileage between summer and winter. That's right... NONE. Maybe the lighter traffic during the summer months means I get better MPG, offsetting the 10% power drain of using the AC. Maybe it's that anything less than 5% is hard to calculate when you figure your mileage a tank at a time.
Or maybe it's just that automotive air conditioners leech so little power from your engine that it doesn't really make a difference...
Either way, it seems like the "no dark paint" proposal and now the "tinted glass" proposal are just CARB trying to look good doing something at the expense of Californians. They've done this over and over, costing Californians BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to no real end... I, for one am sick of it.
Between the debacle surrounding MTBE's (which put every independent gas station in CA out of business) and forcing farmers to rebuild all their (perfectly functioning) farm equipment, CARB has done nothing positive for this state and has done lots to hurt us.
Yes, pollution has gone down, but how much of this is because of CARB initiatives and how much is due to rising pollution and fuel economy standards that affect the whole country and have nothing to do with California's stupid rules?
Pretty soon, the only business left in California will be Hollywood, and with rising prices, even they'll be thinking about going elsewhere...
But what on-line service IS safe any more? Every few weeks, I see news about a breach of a credit card authorization service, military computing system, or some other large system that we'd consider safe.
Google's value is NOT in their security. It's in the fact that they've brought so many new things to the table. Sure, search existed before Google, but go look at Google's product list sometime. It's huge, and many of those things are not easily available elsewhere (and there are some things that aren't YET available, such as on-line storage, but that's another story.)
Maybe it's just my perception, but I've always had the feeling that Google is more of a group of geeks just trying to do cool stuff, rather than the way other large companies in this space present themselves: money first, product second. The irony is that I figure that kind of attitude would fit in well with this crowd.
But then, there will always be those who disagree - if only because they don't want to be in the "it" crowd.
I guess my point is that there's no such thing as completely secure. ANY public system can be cracked, and I'd go so far as to say that any significantly large system has been cracked at some point.
That's why we make backups and use encryption. The First Rule is "Always have a backup," and I've been glad of that from time to time. (Just last night, I accidentally deleted a config file for an app I use, and I had to go rooting around in the recycle bin for it. I'm glad I didn't turn it completely off, like I was tempted to.)
But this only underscores the fact that security and safety is a two-way street. If I were to put my company's payroll data in a Google Docs spreadsheet, or if I were to e-mail a list of passwords through gmail, and that information fell in to the wrong hands, who do you think my company would go after? Who would those companies prosecute? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be Google. I'd not only be fired, but I would be open to criminal prosecution.
Google is being targeted because it's big. Big targets are easy to hit. I'm not saying that there haven't been any privacy violations, but I AM saying that we all need to conduct our business (personal or commercial) with security in mind. There are enough genuine, active threats out there without targeting the passive ones.
As to the world-weary-cynic comment, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. You DO have to be somewhat cynical to detect and avoid fraud; it's the innocent and careless who are easily taken in. I have seen (and blocked) a lot of genuine fraud attempts, and I don't think I'd put a couple of accidental data breaches in the same class as the kinds of intentional acts I've seen.
The small number of times I have been cheated via the Internet (and I can count those on one hand) were the kinds of things that no privacy policy can guard against: People selling inferior merchandise that doesn't do what's claimed and refusing to provide a refund. Perhaps the FTC should be investigating those folks instead.
If anything, a pragmatic attitude toward security in on-line services acts to make the whole industry more secure, not less.
In the meantime, teaching users how to be secure themselves would go a long way toward making the Internet a safe place to be. When every phisher, spammers, and credit card forger have been dealt with, then I can understand worrying about Google's privacy policly.. but who can be really worried about whether someone will see my forwarded chain letters when there's the real risk of someone hacking in to my PayPal account, transferring my funds to an offshore account, and then using my EBay account to sell items that don't exist?
See, that's the part I don't get.
This big, nebulous word "Privacy" doesn't mean much in the real world. I have a gmail account, for example. What specific privacy am I giving up by using gmail as opposed to hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or my own ISP's mail service?
All of those services' mailboxes can be read by administrators, and your ISP has a lot more of your information than Google does.
Can you give me a specific example of how some specific breach of "privacy" would be used against you? Forget about stupid user mistakes (hosting confidential information on Google Docs, for example) or conspiracy theory stuff (The FBI comes to get you without a warrant because of something you typed in a Google search), and give me a real world example of how your privacy would be violated under ordinary circumstances.
Love Google or hate Google, I think we'd all agree that Google has done more for consumers on the Internet in the last decade than just about any other single company. Nobody offers Google's breadth of services at any price, let alone free. That doesn't excuse any potential mismanagement of personal information, but I have to wonder how much of this is fueled by market pressures: if you can't compete, { sue | accuse of a crime | sabotage | buy }.
I'm getting so sick of the way the business world operates. My philosophy has always been "mission first", or your first priority is to serve your customer's needs and forward the mission of the company. You charge money to accomplish this goal, not the other way around. But the business world has lost sight of this goal, and instead chooses to use any dirty trick necessary to force competition out of business. In the end, this kind of atmosphere hurts us all.
CC died because it took too long to buy anything there. Instead of a checkout line, you have to go to the customer service counter, where one guy is handling returns, checking people out, and dealing with the phone.
One time, I went to buy a DVD during my lunch break. The store is a block away, and there wasn't really a line at the counter (I think there was one guy in front of me), and yet I barely made it back to the office by the end of my lunch break.
I was in the store for nearly 40 minutes. To buy one DVD.
I agree with you.
My on-line presence is nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone could google my username and quickly find my opinions on just about everything.
On the other side: a friend of mine had a bad experience related to this. After being turned down by dozens of employers, he became very frustrated and confused. One hiring manager seemed to really like him after their interview, and even told him that the final interview with the company owner was a formality, and that he was all but hired.
But when he went to see the owner, the interview was very brief, and the owner (and now the hiring manager) were very cold toward him. Nothing happened between the two interviews, so what went wrong?
Well, on a subsequent interview with a staffing firm, they flat-out told him to clean up his web presence. As it turns out, he was hosting some pretty dark poetry on his web site (with the same domain name as his e-mail address), and he also revealed some things about himself that would make most employers nervous.
Needless to say, he's cleaned up his site, and he now uses a different domain for his e-mail.
But the thing is, were these companies wrong?
I don't think they were. If I was hiring someone, I'd want to know how they think and what they do outside the job - at least a little bit. In some cases, it's not a big deal when someone is working a job where they don't deal with the public. But in customer-facing jobs, appearance is a big factor. Nowdays, appearance isn't just what someone looks like at work; it's also what they do on-line where customers (or potential customers) are likely to encounter them.
So hell yeah: I'd consider someone's Facebook and MySpace profiles. I'd spend an hour or two checking out the obviously visible stuff on-line.
Remember that discrimination is only bad when it's about the things one can't control. You can't choose your race, sex, or your age. You CAN control what you post on-line, especially when it contains things that would embarrass your employer.
:D True.
Actually, I know someone who had his line "upgraded" to a metered business line. The reason? It was in use almost constantly from the time his teenage daughters got home until they went to bed. Being a metered line, they charge by the minute, and so the bill went from $25 or so to a couple hundred bucks.
Needless to say, he went to a different provider (I think he went with Vonage, actually.)
I definitely agree with one thing you said: disclosure. ISP's don't disclose the fact that they oversell their bandwidth by a factor of 10:1 or more. Not too long ago, I was working for an ISP. We had 1 modem for every 10 customers. The problem is, the modems cust us more per month than each customer; there was no way we could have afforded to have a 1:1 relationship of ports to users. It would have cost each customer $50 a month, instead of the $10 we were charging. Actually, it probably would have cost $100 a month to cover everything: bandwidth, harware, staff, and modem ports. And that was for DIALUP! Imagine if your broadband provider charged you what it actually costs THEM to provide 10MB of full-time 100% bandwidth. You'd be paying several HUNDRED dollars a month. Actually, for a 10MB leased line, it could be well over $1000.
But that's the problem: People just don't get what things REALLY cost. I hear "it's my bandwidth. I paid for it!" over and over again, but it's simply NOT TRUE. You're paying for a fraction of the bandwidth you'r actually getting; you're getting it because you share it with many other people.
And yes, there's a new thing called "Speedboost" in my market. My ISP does exactly what you describe: for 5 or 10 seconds, they let the modem faster, and then the connection is throttled back to the rated speed. I think that actually helps the ISP: shorter, faster streams should be easier to manage than more slower, longer connections.
And yes, there's no doubt that we need upgrades - but how do you know that's not already happening?
As long as they're not using microwave-free license-free spectrum, it could work.
I've used communication devices on nearly every band you can think of: HF, VHF, 400 and 800 MHz UHF, and Microwave.
Microwave communications are great for short-range (home WiFi) or point to point communications such as connecting two office buildings or radio repeaters with line-of sight coverage. However, for broadcast coverage, you pretty much need something right in the middle of the TV spectrum... conviently enough, some this is being freed up for other use in 3 months.
Cellular technology has been proven to work; the sheer number of mobile phones is proof of that. Something like this could be buit as an outgrowth of the existing cellular infrastructure, and I could see this working very well.
Of course, existing broadband providers, ISP's, telcos, and wireless providers are going to fight this tooth and nail. Giving someone free, portable data access means severely undercutting what is a very profitable business right now.
While I think free Internet is a great idea, I don't think it'll fly. However, I'm betting that a $20/mo service could succeed - but only with some severe modifications to existing protocols.
Considering the difficulty in managing such a large network, it'd be necessary to build bandwidth controls in to the system, prventing someone with a P2P peer from bringing a whole cell to its knees. A simple quota-based system might work (each cell throttles anyone who's using more than n bytes/hour), and it might even be the most fair: you can use as many bits as you want when nobody else needs them, but once someone else connects, you have to slow down and make room.
The infrastucture can't handle when people abuse it. You can't use your home phone to talk 24/7, yet you have "unlimited" phone service. The same applies to home Internet service: right in your user agreement is a clause that says something like "it's unlimited, but that doesn't mean infinite."
Home internet service is designed to be used on-demand, not maxed out 24/7.
No person should be denied the basic necessities of life because he can't pay for it: food, shelter, electricity, water, basic communications, and basic medical care. YES, we should be providing these things for all citizens, and every citizen of this country should get BASIC service at no cost.
Besides, other people ARE working on free health care, and the FCC isn't responsible for health care. It's the FCC's job to promote and regulate wireless communications. Using an article about the FCC to whine about health care is about as stupid as using an article about health care to complain about your TV reception. It's a non-sequiter.
As to utilities: I've long thought that we should subsidize a certain level of baisic service for those who can't pay for it. We all pay a Universal Lifeline fee to help pay for phone service for the indigent. Why not transition the telephone ULF to an Internet ULF in preparation for the day that telephones disappear altogether? The switched telephone network is dead; it's just a matter of time until everyone realizes it.
On the other hand, the Detroit 3 wants this loan to go to them solely as a bailout, which was NOT what the loan was designed for. This is the reason Tesla Motors is complaining.
I'd say "let em fail, so we can build something better in their place," if it weren't for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are directly or indirectly dependent on the auto industry. If we're bailing out banks, then we should bail out car makers, but with VERY strict performance guarantees. If performance falls below those guidelines, the corporation is dissolved and the pieces sold off to the highest bidders. (We should preserve US auto manufacturing if at all possible, even if it's not in the same form as we know it today.)
I'm not arguing against your idea, but I'm curious: Cost aside, how much power does this create per-acre, and how much maintenance and consumables does it require, compared to the various forms of solar power?
So? Even if 100% of the energy came from coal now, it won't forever. There's a large solar plant going in near where I live; it'll provide several hundred megawatts of power, and that's far from the only project of this scale that will come in to play over the next few years.
Cars need energy to move; there's no way around that simple fact. But electric cars are much more efficient than gas cars: regenerative braking, no wasted energy during idle, and economy of scale all come in to play. Simply put, 1 watt of power from a multi-megawatt power station is always going to be cleaner than 1 watt from a car engine.
Simply put: without the kind of development Tesla is doing right now, where WILL our next generation of cars come from? The same minds that are causing GM, Ford, and Chrysler to fail? I'd much rather see the US government sink some money in to Tesla right now than see the Japanese (and Koreans and Chinese and Germans) even further erode the US automobile industry.
Maybe it's anti-global of me, but I think we need to foster innovation in this country, or we'll be a "has-been" nation by the time my kid is my age.
Think about it. Even though a Tesla costs 100k, every one on the road is one less gas car on the road, crudding up the atmosphere and using up irreplacable oil. Not only that, but Tesla's future success relies on selling cars at a fraction of that price at some point.
Early adoption is expensive, but without it, there can be no commodity market for the same product. Look at DVD players, for example. Early models were $1000, and there were only a few titles available for the first Christmas season. Now, players can be had for $30, and stores don't even stock VHS any more.
If we don't support this technology now, while it needs subsidies, at what point will the market decide that it IS worth it? When gas is $10 a gallon? $20? $40?
Citing LOLCats as an example, GregNorc said, "Anyways, here it goes: Sometimes 'translating' a quote renders its meaning useless." The phrase he indicated? "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?", part of the "LOLCats" meme that has recently swept the Internet. LOLCats parodies "netspeak" or "l33tsp34k", a pidgin language composed of abbreviated words and words which use numbers to replace syllables....
etc.
Not that anyone uses good English any more. I'm even regularly seeing big blunders in professional blogs and even major newspapers. (And yes, I realize that the original quote was supposed to be ironic: intentionally using bad spelling and punctuation to make a point.)
(And I HATE reading stylized renderings of accented speech... at least for more than 1 or 2 sentences. It slows down my reading and makes it hard to figure out what the person is actually saying.)
The conventions for this situation already exist, if you pay attention when you read the newspaper, magazines, or even high school English. You have 2 choices when quoting someone in print: you can quote exactly what they say, or you can summarize.
When quoting exactly what someone says in a written document, you use quotation marks and write their exact words. You should stick as closely as possible to their original words, unless it's simply impossible to convey their meaning. Fixing Spelling errors? Please do. A spell checker would have fixed it, and I don't feel bad about doing an editor's job. Fixing grammar? I don't know if it's appropriate. The way editors get around missing words or hard to understand language is using brackets. So "How is babby formed? How girl get pregnant?" Is safely translated as "How is [a] baby formed? How [does a] girl get pregnant?". We know that the original speaker didn't say "a" or "does a", but we also accept that they intended to.
Summary is the other method. You could simply say this: Kavya on Yahoo Answers (a 7 year old girl) is asking how women get pregnant. How can we answer her question in a tasteful manner, appropriate for the sensitivities of a year old child?
I'll bet that, even if it doesn't happen at first, this will turn in to a new way to advertise. Either the feds will sell ads to be rotated when there are no wanted madmen on the loose, or they'll integrate the ads directly in to the billboard.
Imagine: Today's wanted felon, brought to you by Florida Orange Juice!
Your argument for spamming China is almost good enough, but the foundation you laid doesn't hold up. IF your underlying ethical arguments for spam being beneficial were correct, then there might be a case. However, you miss two very important points:
1. Spam isn't wrong because it costs more than it benefits. It's wrong because it violates the recipient's right to choose. The recipient should have the right not to receive any unsolicited messages - even if the message promised free money. Your argument is invalid because the sender cannot reliably determine whether the message would indeed be desired by the recipient. Without the ability to make that determination (by an opt-in system, for example), the sender has the ethical obligation to not send the message. Any other argument against spam is really just an attempt to justify the underlying principle using economic or other means. This country has a tradition of supporting individual rights, even when it costs society more than it benefits the individual. Spam should be no different in that regard. (Otherwise, why do we keep paying for welfare?)
A better definition of spam is: any message that is a) broadcast to a large number of recipients by e-mail, text messaging, or other media that requires actions on the part of the end user to remove and b) is undesired by a large subset of the receiving users. The critical factor is NOT whether there's a benefit. The critical factor is whether the end user will want the message.
2. One tenant of morality is that an illegal act is immoral by default. The only exception is where the law is unconscionable. Censorship laws, by and large, are not unconscionable, since a reasonable person can comply with them without violating his conscience. If the law required people to lie, steal, or kill in order to obey it, then the law might be considered unconscionable. Simply blocking objectionable sites is not unethical. Assuming it is would be projecting our morality on to the Chinese people.
So the real question is: is there a situation where censorship laws are unconscionable enough to require us to break those laws? In that case, how can we bypass that censorship and yet still stay within a valid ethical framework? Mass e-mail may be that method, but only if you can establish that the vast majority of the recipients would actually want to know the truth. (Or your version of it... but that's a whole different discussion.)
Too true. There's definitely enough dogma to go around.
That's what I have a problem with: anyone who uses their dogma as an excuse to assault others. Even going back to the OP, the title "Putting Creationists on the spot." What kind of thinking is that, putting someone on the spot because of their beliefs? Shouldn't we be trying to move past this kind of bigotry and hatred?
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Not true. x.com and PayPal were two different companies with two different products back in 2000. x was a bank, PP was an on-line payment service. By buying x.com, PayPal was able to offer debit cards and some other fun stuff they couldn't before (at least not without getting a charter as a bank, which is probably more expensive than simply buying a bank...) I remember it well; I had an x.com debit card at the time, and I used to use both services.
I said the A/C in your HOUSE puts out a constant temp, then went on to explain why the one in your car doesn't - which has nothing to do with turning the compressor on and off. The R-134a A/C in a car usually has a 40 degree drop.
Practically never. I live in SoCal, where "winters" are still in the 60's during the day. I use the defogger maybe 10 days total during the winter months... compared to running the A/C the entire time I'm in the car during the summer.
How is that relevant? Turning the compressor off because of high engine load has nothing to do with thermostatic control.
I also calculate my mileage after every tank, so I'm well aware of my MPG trends. In short, the variations I see due to different driving habits and traffic patterns account for a lot more than using the A/C for an extra 5 minutes per trip. In fact, I've noticed BETTER cooling while the car is running at 60-70 MPH, compared to sitting in traffic. That's no surprise, since more air is flowing over the condenser coil, improving the amount of energy transferred. Since smooth traffic flow is the #1 way to improve mileage, maybe CARB should be finding ways to fix traffic problems, especially stupid engineering decisions that directly contribute to traffic problems. On my drive home, for example, there's a 2-lane merge in the middle of nowhere, and this forces everyone to drive about 25 MPh for about 5 miles. Right after the merge, traffic is back up to 65+.
What bothers me most about all this is that CARB is acting without the benefit of good science. Where are the double-blind scientific studies where someone put 1000 identical models on the road, half of which had the tint, and had people drive the same routes over a 12 month period? So far, I'm not seeing it. There are better ways to cool our cars when they're idle: the Prius's new active solar cooling is one example. Those silver window shades can help, too. Maybe CA should require all drivers to use those on hot days... leaving your shade off on a 90 day would be a $20 ticket.
No, I don't buy it. It's far more likely that either someone stands to make a profit from this or CARB is staffed by incompetent fools.
Here's the problem with CARB's proposal:
The air conditioner in your car is NOT like the one in your house. Your home's air conditioner turns on when the temperature gets too high and turns off when it gets too low. The air coming out the vents is always cooled by the same amount, roughly 20 degrees cooler than the outside air.
But the AC in your car doesn't work this way. When you turn on the AC in your car, you can set the temperature coming out the vents by changing the ratio of air fed from the evaporator coil and the car's heater coil. That's what the little Blue/Red slider does. When the little "AC" light is on, your car's air conditioner is ALWAYS WORKING, always drawing maybe 2 horsepower from your engine. That's maybe 10-15% of the power you're using at highway-speeds.
So how is this reflective glass, which may make a 5 difference, supposed to help AT ALL? Since the compressor runs all the time anyway, how is this supposed to make a difference?
And here's the thing: I see no quantifiable difference in my gas mileage between summer and winter. That's right... NONE. Maybe the lighter traffic during the summer months means I get better MPG, offsetting the 10% power drain of using the AC. Maybe it's that anything less than 5% is hard to calculate when you figure your mileage a tank at a time.
Or maybe it's just that automotive air conditioners leech so little power from your engine that it doesn't really make a difference...
Either way, it seems like the "no dark paint" proposal and now the "tinted glass" proposal are just CARB trying to look good doing something at the expense of Californians. They've done this over and over, costing Californians BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to no real end... I, for one am sick of it.
Between the debacle surrounding MTBE's (which put every independent gas station in CA out of business) and forcing farmers to rebuild all their (perfectly functioning) farm equipment, CARB has done nothing positive for this state and has done lots to hurt us.
Yes, pollution has gone down, but how much of this is because of CARB initiatives and how much is due to rising pollution and fuel economy standards that affect the whole country and have nothing to do with California's stupid rules?
Pretty soon, the only business left in California will be Hollywood, and with rising prices, even they'll be thinking about going elsewhere...
I'm wondering how long it'll be before carriers figure out that trick.
But what on-line service IS safe any more? Every few weeks, I see news about a breach of a credit card authorization service, military computing system, or some other large system that we'd consider safe.
Google's value is NOT in their security. It's in the fact that they've brought so many new things to the table. Sure, search existed before Google, but go look at Google's product list sometime. It's huge, and many of those things are not easily available elsewhere (and there are some things that aren't YET available, such as on-line storage, but that's another story.)
Maybe it's just my perception, but I've always had the feeling that Google is more of a group of geeks just trying to do cool stuff, rather than the way other large companies in this space present themselves: money first, product second. The irony is that I figure that kind of attitude would fit in well with this crowd.
But then, there will always be those who disagree - if only because they don't want to be in the "it" crowd.
I guess my point is that there's no such thing as completely secure. ANY public system can be cracked, and I'd go so far as to say that any significantly large system has been cracked at some point.
That's why we make backups and use encryption. The First Rule is "Always have a backup," and I've been glad of that from time to time. (Just last night, I accidentally deleted a config file for an app I use, and I had to go rooting around in the recycle bin for it. I'm glad I didn't turn it completely off, like I was tempted to.)
But this only underscores the fact that security and safety is a two-way street. If I were to put my company's payroll data in a Google Docs spreadsheet, or if I were to e-mail a list of passwords through gmail, and that information fell in to the wrong hands, who do you think my company would go after? Who would those companies prosecute? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be Google. I'd not only be fired, but I would be open to criminal prosecution.
Google is being targeted because it's big. Big targets are easy to hit. I'm not saying that there haven't been any privacy violations, but I AM saying that we all need to conduct our business (personal or commercial) with security in mind. There are enough genuine, active threats out there without targeting the passive ones.
As to the world-weary-cynic comment, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. You DO have to be somewhat cynical to detect and avoid fraud; it's the innocent and careless who are easily taken in. I have seen (and blocked) a lot of genuine fraud attempts, and I don't think I'd put a couple of accidental data breaches in the same class as the kinds of intentional acts I've seen.
The small number of times I have been cheated via the Internet (and I can count those on one hand) were the kinds of things that no privacy policy can guard against: People selling inferior merchandise that doesn't do what's claimed and refusing to provide a refund. Perhaps the FTC should be investigating those folks instead.
If anything, a pragmatic attitude toward security in on-line services acts to make the whole industry more secure, not less.
In the meantime, teaching users how to be secure themselves would go a long way toward making the Internet a safe place to be. When every phisher, spammers, and credit card forger have been dealt with, then I can understand worrying about Google's privacy policly.. but who can be really worried about whether someone will see my forwarded chain letters when there's the real risk of someone hacking in to my PayPal account, transferring my funds to an offshore account, and then using my EBay account to sell items that don't exist?
See, that's the part I don't get. This big, nebulous word "Privacy" doesn't mean much in the real world. I have a gmail account, for example. What specific privacy am I giving up by using gmail as opposed to hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or my own ISP's mail service? All of those services' mailboxes can be read by administrators, and your ISP has a lot more of your information than Google does. Can you give me a specific example of how some specific breach of "privacy" would be used against you? Forget about stupid user mistakes (hosting confidential information on Google Docs, for example) or conspiracy theory stuff (The FBI comes to get you without a warrant because of something you typed in a Google search), and give me a real world example of how your privacy would be violated under ordinary circumstances.
Wow.
Love Google or hate Google, I think we'd all agree that Google has done more for consumers on the Internet in the last decade than just about any other single company. Nobody offers Google's breadth of services at any price, let alone free. That doesn't excuse any potential mismanagement of personal information, but I have to wonder how much of this is fueled by market pressures: if you can't compete, { sue | accuse of a crime | sabotage | buy }.
I'm getting so sick of the way the business world operates. My philosophy has always been "mission first", or your first priority is to serve your customer's needs and forward the mission of the company. You charge money to accomplish this goal, not the other way around. But the business world has lost sight of this goal, and instead chooses to use any dirty trick necessary to force competition out of business. In the end, this kind of atmosphere hurts us all.
CC died because it took too long to buy anything there. Instead of a checkout line, you have to go to the customer service counter, where one guy is handling returns, checking people out, and dealing with the phone.
One time, I went to buy a DVD during my lunch break. The store is a block away, and there wasn't really a line at the counter (I think there was one guy in front of me), and yet I barely made it back to the office by the end of my lunch break.
I was in the store for nearly 40 minutes. To buy one DVD.
THAT is why CC failed.
I agree with you. My on-line presence is nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone could google my username and quickly find my opinions on just about everything. On the other side: a friend of mine had a bad experience related to this. After being turned down by dozens of employers, he became very frustrated and confused. One hiring manager seemed to really like him after their interview, and even told him that the final interview with the company owner was a formality, and that he was all but hired. But when he went to see the owner, the interview was very brief, and the owner (and now the hiring manager) were very cold toward him. Nothing happened between the two interviews, so what went wrong? Well, on a subsequent interview with a staffing firm, they flat-out told him to clean up his web presence. As it turns out, he was hosting some pretty dark poetry on his web site (with the same domain name as his e-mail address), and he also revealed some things about himself that would make most employers nervous. Needless to say, he's cleaned up his site, and he now uses a different domain for his e-mail. But the thing is, were these companies wrong? I don't think they were. If I was hiring someone, I'd want to know how they think and what they do outside the job - at least a little bit. In some cases, it's not a big deal when someone is working a job where they don't deal with the public. But in customer-facing jobs, appearance is a big factor. Nowdays, appearance isn't just what someone looks like at work; it's also what they do on-line where customers (or potential customers) are likely to encounter them. So hell yeah: I'd consider someone's Facebook and MySpace profiles. I'd spend an hour or two checking out the obviously visible stuff on-line. Remember that discrimination is only bad when it's about the things one can't control. You can't choose your race, sex, or your age. You CAN control what you post on-line, especially when it contains things that would embarrass your employer.
:D True. Actually, I know someone who had his line "upgraded" to a metered business line. The reason? It was in use almost constantly from the time his teenage daughters got home until they went to bed. Being a metered line, they charge by the minute, and so the bill went from $25 or so to a couple hundred bucks. Needless to say, he went to a different provider (I think he went with Vonage, actually.)
I definitely agree with one thing you said: disclosure. ISP's don't disclose the fact that they oversell their bandwidth by a factor of 10:1 or more. Not too long ago, I was working for an ISP. We had 1 modem for every 10 customers. The problem is, the modems cust us more per month than each customer; there was no way we could have afforded to have a 1:1 relationship of ports to users. It would have cost each customer $50 a month, instead of the $10 we were charging. Actually, it probably would have cost $100 a month to cover everything: bandwidth, harware, staff, and modem ports. And that was for DIALUP! Imagine if your broadband provider charged you what it actually costs THEM to provide 10MB of full-time 100% bandwidth. You'd be paying several HUNDRED dollars a month. Actually, for a 10MB leased line, it could be well over $1000. But that's the problem: People just don't get what things REALLY cost. I hear "it's my bandwidth. I paid for it!" over and over again, but it's simply NOT TRUE. You're paying for a fraction of the bandwidth you'r actually getting; you're getting it because you share it with many other people. And yes, there's a new thing called "Speedboost" in my market. My ISP does exactly what you describe: for 5 or 10 seconds, they let the modem faster, and then the connection is throttled back to the rated speed. I think that actually helps the ISP: shorter, faster streams should be easier to manage than more slower, longer connections. And yes, there's no doubt that we need upgrades - but how do you know that's not already happening?
As long as they're not using microwave-free license-free spectrum, it could work. I've used communication devices on nearly every band you can think of: HF, VHF, 400 and 800 MHz UHF, and Microwave. Microwave communications are great for short-range (home WiFi) or point to point communications such as connecting two office buildings or radio repeaters with line-of sight coverage. However, for broadcast coverage, you pretty much need something right in the middle of the TV spectrum... conviently enough, some this is being freed up for other use in 3 months. Cellular technology has been proven to work; the sheer number of mobile phones is proof of that. Something like this could be buit as an outgrowth of the existing cellular infrastructure, and I could see this working very well. Of course, existing broadband providers, ISP's, telcos, and wireless providers are going to fight this tooth and nail. Giving someone free, portable data access means severely undercutting what is a very profitable business right now. While I think free Internet is a great idea, I don't think it'll fly. However, I'm betting that a $20/mo service could succeed - but only with some severe modifications to existing protocols. Considering the difficulty in managing such a large network, it'd be necessary to build bandwidth controls in to the system, prventing someone with a P2P peer from bringing a whole cell to its knees. A simple quota-based system might work (each cell throttles anyone who's using more than n bytes/hour), and it might even be the most fair: you can use as many bits as you want when nobody else needs them, but once someone else connects, you have to slow down and make room.
The infrastucture can't handle when people abuse it. You can't use your home phone to talk 24/7, yet you have "unlimited" phone service. The same applies to home Internet service: right in your user agreement is a clause that says something like "it's unlimited, but that doesn't mean infinite."
Home internet service is designed to be used on-demand, not maxed out 24/7.
No person should be denied the basic necessities of life because he can't pay for it: food, shelter, electricity, water, basic communications, and basic medical care. YES, we should be providing these things for all citizens, and every citizen of this country should get BASIC service at no cost.
Besides, other people ARE working on free health care, and the FCC isn't responsible for health care. It's the FCC's job to promote and regulate wireless communications. Using an article about the FCC to whine about health care is about as stupid as using an article about health care to complain about your TV reception. It's a non-sequiter.
As to utilities: I've long thought that we should subsidize a certain level of baisic service for those who can't pay for it. We all pay a Universal Lifeline fee to help pay for phone service for the indigent. Why not transition the telephone ULF to an Internet ULF in preparation for the day that telephones disappear altogether? The switched telephone network is dead; it's just a matter of time until everyone realizes it.
That's because wifi is Not a good solution for net access. However, tv white space spectrum: that could work.
I'd say "let em fail, so we can build something better in their place," if it weren't for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are directly or indirectly dependent on the auto industry. If we're bailing out banks, then we should bail out car makers, but with VERY strict performance guarantees. If performance falls below those guidelines, the corporation is dissolved and the pieces sold off to the highest bidders. (We should preserve US auto manufacturing if at all possible, even if it's not in the same form as we know it today.)
That's essentially another form of solar energy.
I'm not arguing against your idea, but I'm curious: Cost aside, how much power does this create per-acre, and how much maintenance and consumables does it require, compared to the various forms of solar power?
So? Even if 100% of the energy came from coal now, it won't forever. There's a large solar plant going in near where I live; it'll provide several hundred megawatts of power, and that's far from the only project of this scale that will come in to play over the next few years.
Cars need energy to move; there's no way around that simple fact. But electric cars are much more efficient than gas cars: regenerative braking, no wasted energy during idle, and economy of scale all come in to play. Simply put, 1 watt of power from a multi-megawatt power station is always going to be cleaner than 1 watt from a car engine.
Simply put: without the kind of development Tesla is doing right now, where WILL our next generation of cars come from? The same minds that are causing GM, Ford, and Chrysler to fail? I'd much rather see the US government sink some money in to Tesla right now than see the Japanese (and Koreans and Chinese and Germans) even further erode the US automobile industry.
Maybe it's anti-global of me, but I think we need to foster innovation in this country, or we'll be a "has-been" nation by the time my kid is my age.
Think about it. Even though a Tesla costs 100k, every one on the road is one less gas car on the road, crudding up the atmosphere and using up irreplacable oil. Not only that, but Tesla's future success relies on selling cars at a fraction of that price at some point. Early adoption is expensive, but without it, there can be no commodity market for the same product. Look at DVD players, for example. Early models were $1000, and there were only a few titles available for the first Christmas season. Now, players can be had for $30, and stores don't even stock VHS any more. If we don't support this technology now, while it needs subsidies, at what point will the market decide that it IS worth it? When gas is $10 a gallon? $20? $40?
Citing LOLCats as an example, GregNorc said, "Anyways, here it goes: Sometimes 'translating' a quote renders its meaning useless." The phrase he indicated? "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?", part of the "LOLCats" meme that has recently swept the Internet. LOLCats parodies "netspeak" or "l33tsp34k", a pidgin language composed of abbreviated words and words which use numbers to replace syllables....
etc.
Not that anyone uses good English any more. I'm even regularly seeing big blunders in professional blogs and even major newspapers. (And yes, I realize that the original quote was supposed to be ironic: intentionally using bad spelling and punctuation to make a point.)
(And I HATE reading stylized renderings of accented speech... at least for more than 1 or 2 sentences. It slows down my reading and makes it hard to figure out what the person is actually saying.)
The conventions for this situation already exist, if you pay attention when you read the newspaper, magazines, or even high school English. You have 2 choices when quoting someone in print: you can quote exactly what they say, or you can summarize. When quoting exactly what someone says in a written document, you use quotation marks and write their exact words. You should stick as closely as possible to their original words, unless it's simply impossible to convey their meaning. Fixing Spelling errors? Please do. A spell checker would have fixed it, and I don't feel bad about doing an editor's job. Fixing grammar? I don't know if it's appropriate. The way editors get around missing words or hard to understand language is using brackets. So "How is babby formed? How girl get pregnant?" Is safely translated as "How is [a] baby formed? How [does a] girl get pregnant?". We know that the original speaker didn't say "a" or "does a", but we also accept that they intended to. Summary is the other method. You could simply say this: Kavya on Yahoo Answers (a 7 year old girl) is asking how women get pregnant. How can we answer her question in a tasteful manner, appropriate for the sensitivities of a year old child?
I'll bet that, even if it doesn't happen at first, this will turn in to a new way to advertise. Either the feds will sell ads to be rotated when there are no wanted madmen on the loose, or they'll integrate the ads directly in to the billboard. Imagine: Today's wanted felon, brought to you by Florida Orange Juice!
Your argument for spamming China is almost good enough, but the foundation you laid doesn't hold up. IF your underlying ethical arguments for spam being beneficial were correct, then there might be a case. However, you miss two very important points:
1. Spam isn't wrong because it costs more than it benefits. It's wrong because it violates the recipient's right to choose. The recipient should have the right not to receive any unsolicited messages - even if the message promised free money. Your argument is invalid because the sender cannot reliably determine whether the message would indeed be desired by the recipient. Without the ability to make that determination (by an opt-in system, for example), the sender has the ethical obligation to not send the message. Any other argument against spam is really just an attempt to justify the underlying principle using economic or other means. This country has a tradition of supporting individual rights, even when it costs society more than it benefits the individual. Spam should be no different in that regard. (Otherwise, why do we keep paying for welfare?)
A better definition of spam is: any message that is a) broadcast to a large number of recipients by e-mail, text messaging, or other media that requires actions on the part of the end user to remove and b) is undesired by a large subset of the receiving users. The critical factor is NOT whether there's a benefit. The critical factor is whether the end user will want the message.
2. One tenant of morality is that an illegal act is immoral by default. The only exception is where the law is unconscionable. Censorship laws, by and large, are not unconscionable, since a reasonable person can comply with them without violating his conscience. If the law required people to lie, steal, or kill in order to obey it, then the law might be considered unconscionable. Simply blocking objectionable sites is not unethical. Assuming it is would be projecting our morality on to the Chinese people.
So the real question is: is there a situation where censorship laws are unconscionable enough to require us to break those laws? In that case, how can we bypass that censorship and yet still stay within a valid ethical framework? Mass e-mail may be that method, but only if you can establish that the vast majority of the recipients would actually want to know the truth. (Or your version of it... but that's a whole different discussion.)
Too true. There's definitely enough dogma to go around.
That's what I have a problem with: anyone who uses their dogma as an excuse to assault others. Even going back to the OP, the title "Putting Creationists on the spot." What kind of thinking is that, putting someone on the spot because of their beliefs? Shouldn't we be trying to move past this kind of bigotry and hatred?