Well I don't see why you'd expect it to make sense from a consumer point of view. I mean, I've never met anyone who haven't seen straight through it - it's a way to push people into spreading the game to others, making more people play, getting more people addicted to clicking, to spending on micropayments, et.c.
So it doesn't seem like such a ridiculous concept from their point of view. And really if you want game concepts to make sense I'm still waiting for the day when I can drink some red goo out of a bottle and regain my health after having been stabbed nearly to death in a swordfight. I mean there might be some things that make sense in gaming, but there are plenty of things that are just nonsensical that we still never question. Respawing? Conveniently placed stores in the middle of the wilderness to sell off your items and stock up on health potions before the next boss? Anti-gravity-boobs?
I mean, they probably don't have enough cash, but if they do I'd be quite happy with that outcome. The more 'bad' companies that consolidate under one name, the better. Make it easier to know when to drop a title and run.
Besides, I'd just love to see what Zynga could do with SWTOR. Integrate with your facebook friends? Add 67 more friends to be able to buy a light sabre from the store, OR buy credits directly from Zynga. Just about $900 a month or a few thousand friends should make sure you have a pleasant gaming experience. Hey what are you complaining about, it's FREE TO PLAY! Not their fault if you don't have enough friends, or money, to play their free games.
Regarding 2: No. Not especially if you are Russian - more like especially if you're a human living in the world of today, where a Russia that reverts to old habits is a dangerous fucking thing. As someone who was actually alive when the soviet union broke up in '91 and have visited some ex-soviet states in the time since, I've seen both sides of the coin. Trust me, this one is better.
Or was. It's getting bad again, and it's getting bad quickly. Putin sucking up to the church, smashing down on any political dissent... If this is allowed to go unchecked it's a matter of when not if russia will start the rearmament of their military forces, if they haven't already, and once more become a volatile player in world politics with their finger on the launch button.
Now I live in Sweden, so I'm close enough that maybe I should be worried for my own sake, but I'm not. We've got Finland between us and the Russians, and nobody fucks with those guys and get away with it. But on a political scale and a global relations scale, this is worrying news indeed. The fact that other countries just wave it off, well... that's no surprise. But you can bet your ass their military advisers have started drawing up plans for the worst case scenario.
20 years from now some user tries out the new free game on facebook. It's got some number puzzles, some geography aspects, inserts pictures of his friends here and there as he walks around a virtual city.
On the other side, the malicious company gathers information about what people on your friends list are closest to you by how you react when you see their pictures, they probably know what city you live in from facebook so unknown to you the city you've been walking through has been a simplified version of your own hometown, showing what parts of it you are more familiar with and have positive feelings towards. The number games are located around where the atms in town are, which means subconsciously you'll be thinking of your pin code and probably favour those numbers.
That's just off the top of my head, the first ideas I got. Expand it to credit card numbers, put a card in the game that you "pay" with, and any number game you play in connection to it you might give away your credit card numbers. Of course odds are they already have that from selling you in game bonuses.
No wait, I'm just thinking of how zynga operates.
But yeah, I'm sure this technology could make for even worse versions. The most sophisticated phishing attack in history, a trawling operation, catching near everyone. And all completely above board, seemingly... A hit game, the familiarity people feel making it so popular... And then after a few weeks, a few hundred million gets stolen. Bank accounts en masse turning up empty.
Seems to me your arguing doesn't quite make sense.
1. This guy has a contract.
That's it really. No more points needed. If joyent bought that contract as part of their acquisitions, then they also bought the liability for it. You can't buy a contract without accepting that you have to live by it, that's sort of the whole point of a contract. Now the argument in court will be about whether or not the company he bought the contract with still exists. Unless it went bankrupt the answer should be yes - when you buy a company it merges with you, it doesn't disappear, it becomes part of a larger whole. Nothing I can find mentions anything about bankruptcy, so... see point 1. This guy has a contract. If the company no longer wishes to honour that, they are breaking the contract and he should have the right to a refund.
I'd start my claim at the original price adjusted for inflation, and allow them to barter me down to the original price. I wouldn't accept anything in the way of services from them, because I would never again do business with them. I am not in the habit of rewarding companies that pull shit like this.
I could guess, but until we see the actual algorithms they use (i.e. never) that's all it would be. Insurance companies tend to have pretty good data on what kind of behaviour gets you involved in accidents, so I wouldn't be so quick to assume they'll be idiots about it.
Let's examine their motivation for a moment... They want to raise the premium for those that lodge a lot of insurance claims. I.e. those that get into a lot of accidents. Granted they SAY the opposite - that they want to lower the premiums for safe drivers, but that's pretty much the same thing in company speak: lower the premiums for those who are rarely involved in accidents, bump prices for everyone, those that are rarely in accidents don't complain because they still pay less, and those that are more often in accidents... well.
Anyway, the users motivation is to be rarely in accidents. Granted, if you answer it impulsively you'd say you want to pay less for your insurance, but in the end it's the same thing. Those that drive in a way that is involved in fewer accidents will get rewarded, thus you want to drive in a way that gets you involved in fewer accidents... according to the insurance company. Who, by all rights, should know... after all next to the police they have the biggest databases ever on any accidents, causes, situations, cars involved and everything like that.
So really, the only way they would give a good score to that half deaf half blind guy who pulls out in traffic infront of you and refuses to speed up, is if his behaviour is less likely to cause an accident than yours. I trust them to be right in this, because they are motivated to be right - if they are wrong they get less money from high risk people, thus making them lose money overall. It's in their own best interest to be right.
And it's in your best interest to slow the fuck down when you're passing an on-ramp or crossroads, so you don't have to step on the breaks quite so often... Like someone once told me "If you keep getting hit by lightning, maybe you should consider not climbing trees in story weather." Or in other words, if this happens so often to you specifically, perhaps it's not so much them but you that can change your behaviour for a safer driving environment for all of us. Of course I couldn't say for sure, since I have no insight in you, your driving style, your environment, and all that...
Yes, it is indeed a foregone conclusion that the attacker will break first, if the company/entity they are attacking is anything but small to mid sized. Anything larger than that should be able to absorb the costs you talk about as a roadbump. A significant loss, quite possibly, but in business school they taught us to always be prepared for unexpected loss.
Your hosting provider won't let you sit back and wait? Do they also hold you responsible for lightning strikes? I think you need to switch hosting providers. As far as I understand it they fall into two categories relevant to this topic: Page Hosting, which means you're small enough that this should indeed hurt you... in which case they can just shut your page down while it happens - anything beyond that is their problem, you're paying them to handle the network side of things. Or Server Hosting, in which case the server side problem is yours, and the network side problem is still theirs. The only thing your hosting provider could realistically complain about here is transfer - i.e. you'd be paying for more bandwidth. This is already regulated in contract, so basically if you have a machine that can handle the traffic then it would be just dandy to sit back and wait it out, as long as you can absorb the extra transferage fees.
Of course I'm not saying that's the best idea. The best idea is to do what people do today, try to filter the traffic, while pursuing legal options to try and track down the origin and shut it down. The next best idea in my opinion is to just pull the plug for the duration. Let the "big scary hacker" blow and blow and get his street cred for bringing you down, and then just flick the switch, back up, good as new. I'd recommend combining this with researching the attacks however, so you can be ready to filter them out with little effort should he try a second time... but in reality the attention span of these people is about the lifecycle of a gnat.
Fair enough, for an extremely small subset of sites I can see how it would have a worrisome impact on their bottom line, namely as you mentioned betting sites if properly timed. I'm sure there are one or two other use-cases I'm missing, but the point remains... DDoS has become the hammer of the "angry child on the internet" toolbox. To them, every problem looks like a nail. To most of us, we just roll our eyes at them and get on with our lives. Maybe we have some interesting discussions on internet security or such, but all in all it's a non-issue.
It's like beating their chest and bragging because they argued with the cashier at McDonald's for thirty minutes, delaying her giving service to anyone else. Did they piss some people off? Quite possibly. But you can bet the vast majority of them don't hold McDonald's liable for "that guy's" childish actions. There's always going to be a "that guy", and there is always going to be a McDonald's. Argue/DDoS until you fall down dead from exhaustion, the moment you're gone it'll be "Next Customer, Please."
While I'm a rather happy pirate and pirate supporter, I don't think you can quite count it as "merely linking" if you actively source pirated material to link to. The flimsy excuse the pirate bay has for instance is that it's "just an indexing site" and can just as happily be used for legal material... when you are going out and looking for pirated stuff to link to, "merely" leaves the table.
Also I might just be tired, but the summary makes it seem like he got four years out of a maximum of two possible - that's not the case. He got 4 years out of a maximum of TEN possible according to the articles I've seen about it.
And now I feel all dirty for having to take the wrong side in this argument. I wish people would understand that if we stopped using hyperbole and chest thumping tactics we'd win on default in the eyes of the public. With articles like this, misrepresenting facts, twisting words, transparent agendas... That's as low and useless as the *AA tactics we oppose.
I need a shower, proceed with the discussion without me.
I mean seriously, even if you manage to "kill" a large entity on the internet with a DDoS, all you do is give them more publicity and a few hours of people going "What? Where did it go? Oh, I'll check again to see if it works later." Shut a site down for days, keep it troubled for weeks, and you've expended great amounts of resources at.... giving them more publicity. If you've caused them any pain it's miniscule, they've regrouped, patched a few systems, installed a couple of load balancers, whatever it is they do... and then they are back. And the attack is over.
It always ends.
The only entity that a DDoS could be expected to be truly effective against would be one too small to be worth using it against.
Well, there isn't a perfect answer, because as others have mentioned the list would be another one in five years, or in ten, and so on. Basically if you live in southern europe, you have a lot of "up" to go to, thinking about places that are better choices financially, politically, to raise families in or just to have a tech career in. You should consider the next thing: how hard is it going to be to emigrate?
If you are within the EU, you can pack your bags and drive to another EU country, get a place to live, and you basically only have to sign some papers within three months and get a job. That's it. The simplicity of this process compared to having to get a job in advance, apply for residency and work permits with the help of your employer, and all that shite that you'd have to do in most other places makes it a huge advantage. So the question then becomes, what's the most stable economy in EU? Well, none of them, because they're all in the EU.
I'm from Sweden myself, and I'm considering moving elsewhere in the EU later, for other reasons, so I have other concerns... however for you, I'd recommend scandinavia. Specifically because if you move to Sweden for instance, and then live here for a while, getting a swedish citizenship... then you can move to Norway afterwards through the agreements that the scandinavian countries has with each other. Norway has their own oil money, good stable finances, beautiful nature, and all that, and are not in the EU. If your worst worry is financial collapse, then that's probably a decent place to be. You might be able to move there directly of course, but not as easily.
I suppose you could also move to the border of Sweden and work in Norway - a lot of people around here do that. Better pay, lower living costs.
But there's no magic bullet... you're going to have to weigh the pros and cons here. For all you know in 20 years the place you live might be the financial hub of europe.
Proving my point in other posts. Quote from wikipedia: "Newzbin is a British Usenet indexing website, intended to facilitate access to content on Usenet. The site has caused controversy over its stance on copyrighted material".
Operating under this domain is inviting scrutiny from the authorities and other parties, so only people who are already operating fringe businesses or straight out illegal ones would be (should be) interested.
Well, while my mother certainly wouldn't have minded - she as I was of the opinion that swearing is for emphasis and to be reserved for such - no, I wasn't swearing at my mother at age 8. Especially not in English since I never spoke that to her. I did a paraphrased idiomatic translation to express the general level such replies would have had.
I personally disagree, for the simple reason that the choice of doing nothing is still a choice. Fate, chance, his noodly appendage, whatever the reason you've been put in a situation where your actions decide if 10 people die or 1. It's not about deciding what's best for someone else because no matter what you choose, you've disappointed some people. The family of the child, or the ten families of the railworkers.
Like I said, it's a very common choice to do nothing, and people justify it in many different ways... but when it comes right down to it it's just based on the fallacy that doing nothing isn't an action. It is an action, it's the action of turning away, of keep walking, of ignoring the fact that ten people are going to die because you did nothing.
I actually had quite an interesting conversation about this with some behavioural scientists a few years back, which basically reached the conclusion that this is in fact one of the biggest factors holding us back in life. Choosing non-action due to this psychological fallacy applies even in cases where noone dies. It's what causes most people to not intervene when a crime is happening, it's what causes most people to not take a chance because they don't think they can make it so why bother trying, basically it's what is holding us all back.
If every human pulled the lever, killing the child, saving ten families the pain and suffering, then we as a race would be better off.
But then that's not in the human nature, so we'll have to live with what we've got.
It doesn't seem you quite grasped my post, even though you indeed must have skimmed through most of it. To just summarize I can point out as I already has the flaw in your last paragraph here - in other countries with higher participation nothing changes either - while the numbers of people involved increase, the percentage of them that are engaged, competent, educated, halfway sane, stays about the same. Since politics is a game of percentages you'd have to change this fact rather than just the amount of people involved.
And as for facts of basic human nature, no I'm not going to bother justify that claim: rather than have me sit here for a few days talking about the more in depth studies of sociology, just assume I'm full of crap and take a look around you. Do you see any evidence, anywhere, that people when left to their own devices (i.e. for instance anonymously on the internet, in the comments of slashdot, in crowds milling down the street) that the majority of these people want to engage themselves in the actual improvement of their community/site/context?
Sure you'll hear a lot of people asking for improvements, but how many do you see backing those that do something? A lot of people? That's great. Now how many is that percentually if you include every visitor and lurker and passer-by? Not quite so impressive?
Now that's the observable behaviour of humans today. It could be argued whether or not this is an aspect of basic human behaviour or not, of basic human nature, but it's what we got. If you want to argue how we can change that, well then we're not talking about making a government work any more, then we're talking about how to change the world into a better place.
There are improvements that can be made sure, but then there is also a lot of things that end up in fairy-tale land. We could probably argue for a long time about what would go where.
Well, first off I'm not american so any analysis I make of your system is coming from an outside view. However I have been politically active and interested in the sociology of politics. As such I can emphatically say that I don't believe such a system exists, and furthermore I don't believe a such system CAN exist, because it goes against several basic facts about human nature.
So I would disagree that the US system could function that way - just as much that I would disagree that any other system could. Not in a real world situation. Many political systems seem really good on paper, but in reality we don't exist in a vacuum. There are outside influences, there are nutjobs, there is hunger, mental disorders, other societies to compete with, financial interests, personal problems, all the way down to being really tired one morning and pressing the wrong button when you vote. These things happen, and the sum of all this, the sum of the fact that we are human and not perfect, means that no perfect system can ever exist. The best we can hope for is pretty much what we've got. We can change it around a bit, but add some here and lose some there...
As for my best argument against you, it's right there in the first sentence of your last paragraph. "What it would take is a fully engaged and educated electorate."
Sorry, it's not in the human nature for every individual to be engaged in politics, nor for every person to be educated. There will always be some people who want to change the world yet know nothing about it, and some people who might know a lot yet choose to ignore it completely and sit at home. And some people who vote for the other guy because he has a nicer wife. Or whatever. Even around here where a lot more people vote than in the US, it really doesn't matter. The fraction of stupidity remains about the same. (Write ins for the donald duck party is always popular.)
The point is very simple... if we want a system that actually works, it has to be one that deals with the fact that most people don't care, most people couldn't agree even if they did care, and a whole lot of them will argue about things just because they feel like it, and if their neighbour has something they want it's about fifty fifty whether they'll argue that they should get it as well, or that the neighbour should lose it. Humans are humans. Rationality, education, political engagement... as a species these things are not high up on our list. It's for a small clique of us, really.
Actually I do count them out. It's an unlikely market at best, and what little of it do exist won't be wanting to pay for the amount of traffic/page rank and so on that those domains likely have accrued. And no serious hardcorce gamer site would be unaware of the domains background, which means they'd pretty much be paying a lot of money just to guarantee that they are from day one linked to illegal activities. Not that they do anything illegal, no... But that people have a reasonable suspicion that they might, that they might condone it, or whatever. It doesn't take a genius to see that the only people who can safely and comfortably use the name are those who are already operating on the fringe of the law, and thus have procedures in place for dealing with that.
Sounds like shady marketers would be the only ones who would actually want it, after all for the rest of us it's just an open invitation for various agencies to start digging for dirt on us. If getting caught for torrenting small amounts of pirated goods is about as likely as getting hit by lightning, then buying this domain would be akin to climbing up onto the highest building around during a lightningstorm wearing your special copper-clad "protection from girls +3" homemade armour and swinging a long copper rod angrily at the skies.
Well yes, as you see in the last paragraph of the post you're quoting I don't believe in centralized government, for that exact reason. However those tendencies would indeed be beneficial in a high ranking politician, if we assume we could magically believe they were actually there to do good and not for their own benefit.
I suppose there is a longshot - if we could model a government that actually rewarded people for benefitting the society and punished - i.e. rejected, threw out, those that acted primarily in their own interest - then a sociopath would be the best one for the position. He would act in the best interest of society because that would at that point be in his or her own best interest. People are funny like that, some people do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
It could be argued that it's also required. After all it comes down to the old psychological quiz... a train is out of control. You're standing right next to a lever that will change it's path. Down the path it is currently going ten men are working on the tracks, and will be killed if you don't throw the switch. However if you do throw the switch, the train will barrel down the next tracks, where a child is playing.
A high ranking politician has to be able to weigh those things dispassionately, calculate the loss to society as a whole from ten men (how old are they, how much do they benefit/cost the society?) versus one child (what can that child achieve, does it have a good or bad start in life, how much bad publicity will be caused by its death? - and yes, the last one matters, because bad publicity will affect the politicians possibilities to save ten more men the next day.)
Psychologists have found that when given a choice like that, many of us rather do nothing. We don't want blood on our hands by our own action, we feel less bad if it's by inaction. That's because these are people with empathy who will think of the first as a murder committed by us and the second as a tragic accident. The fact that we could have cut suffering from ten families to one by the throw of a switch... well, that doesn't carry into it for us.
Empathy is not always a good thing. High military command and high political command are two places where, for better or worse, it's a drawback. Those places need cold objectivity and goal oriented thinking... Of course then we come down to what goals someone is actually pursuing, but that's a whole other argument...
Note that I personally am against centralized government, partially because of this reason. Positions of power attracts, feeds, and needs exactly the kind of people in them that we wouldn't want there. Doesn't matter if it's a democracy or a dictatorship, when you're looking for someone to lead millions of people, then normal people won't step up to the plate. And if they try, they get run over by those that are better at it... the sociopaths, amongst others.
Yeah, I've seen some info on that and it seems pretty neat - I'm sure it will get a lot of followers.
For my personal use I'd still prefer not to have one - or not to use it once I upgrade to a reader that has it. When I'm away from steady electricity for a long time then it's easier to carry a spare pair of AA batteries for a portable camping light than it is to carry some backup power source for the reader itself. And if the portable camping light gives up the ghost before my kindle does, I can still read by a candle, or during the day, which I wouldn't be able to if I had used the internal backlight until the batteries ran dry.
So it depends on your use-case: for me battery life trumps the convenience of a built in backlight. It will however be nice when I'm actually at home, so for those (likely the majority) that mostly uses their kindle in places where batterylife isn't an issue I can see how it's a great addition.
Huh, there you go, I did not know that. I mean I still have no clue what real world problems get solved by that kind of math, but I know they do. Somehow. As a friend of mine put it: "I'm just an advanced maths degree away from understanding why anyone would get an advanced maths degree."
No, it most certainly shouldn't. "Because I can" can never be a blanket explanation. There are a lot of things I _can_ do that would be a complete waste of time, and in addition to that there are a lot of things I can do that would be immoral, illegal, or even borderline suicidal to pursuit. "Because I can" is not enough, never has been, and never should be.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the weirdest shit every time I go there.
Well I don't see why you'd expect it to make sense from a consumer point of view. I mean, I've never met anyone who haven't seen straight through it - it's a way to push people into spreading the game to others, making more people play, getting more people addicted to clicking, to spending on micropayments, et.c.
So it doesn't seem like such a ridiculous concept from their point of view. And really if you want game concepts to make sense I'm still waiting for the day when I can drink some red goo out of a bottle and regain my health after having been stabbed nearly to death in a swordfight. I mean there might be some things that make sense in gaming, but there are plenty of things that are just nonsensical that we still never question. Respawing? Conveniently placed stores in the middle of the wilderness to sell off your items and stock up on health potions before the next boss? Anti-gravity-boobs?
I mean, they probably don't have enough cash, but if they do I'd be quite happy with that outcome. The more 'bad' companies that consolidate under one name, the better. Make it easier to know when to drop a title and run.
Besides, I'd just love to see what Zynga could do with SWTOR. Integrate with your facebook friends? Add 67 more friends to be able to buy a light sabre from the store, OR buy credits directly from Zynga. Just about $900 a month or a few thousand friends should make sure you have a pleasant gaming experience. Hey what are you complaining about, it's FREE TO PLAY! Not their fault if you don't have enough friends, or money, to play their free games.
Regarding 2:
No. Not especially if you are Russian - more like especially if you're a human living in the world of today, where a Russia that reverts to old habits is a dangerous fucking thing. As someone who was actually alive when the soviet union broke up in '91 and have visited some ex-soviet states in the time since, I've seen both sides of the coin. Trust me, this one is better.
Or was. It's getting bad again, and it's getting bad quickly. Putin sucking up to the church, smashing down on any political dissent... If this is allowed to go unchecked it's a matter of when not if russia will start the rearmament of their military forces, if they haven't already, and once more become a volatile player in world politics with their finger on the launch button.
Now I live in Sweden, so I'm close enough that maybe I should be worried for my own sake, but I'm not. We've got Finland between us and the Russians, and nobody fucks with those guys and get away with it. But on a political scale and a global relations scale, this is worrying news indeed. The fact that other countries just wave it off, well... that's no surprise. But you can bet your ass their military advisers have started drawing up plans for the worst case scenario.
20 years from now some user tries out the new free game on facebook. It's got some number puzzles, some geography aspects, inserts pictures of his friends here and there as he walks around a virtual city.
On the other side, the malicious company gathers information about what people on your friends list are closest to you by how you react when you see their pictures, they probably know what city you live in from facebook so unknown to you the city you've been walking through has been a simplified version of your own hometown, showing what parts of it you are more familiar with and have positive feelings towards. The number games are located around where the atms in town are, which means subconsciously you'll be thinking of your pin code and probably favour those numbers.
That's just off the top of my head, the first ideas I got. Expand it to credit card numbers, put a card in the game that you "pay" with, and any number game you play in connection to it you might give away your credit card numbers. Of course odds are they already have that from selling you in game bonuses.
No wait, I'm just thinking of how zynga operates.
But yeah, I'm sure this technology could make for even worse versions. The most sophisticated phishing attack in history, a trawling operation, catching near everyone. And all completely above board, seemingly... A hit game, the familiarity people feel making it so popular... And then after a few weeks, a few hundred million gets stolen. Bank accounts en masse turning up empty.
Seems to me your arguing doesn't quite make sense.
1. This guy has a contract.
That's it really. No more points needed. If joyent bought that contract as part of their acquisitions, then they also bought the liability for it. You can't buy a contract without accepting that you have to live by it, that's sort of the whole point of a contract. Now the argument in court will be about whether or not the company he bought the contract with still exists. Unless it went bankrupt the answer should be yes - when you buy a company it merges with you, it doesn't disappear, it becomes part of a larger whole. Nothing I can find mentions anything about bankruptcy, so... see point 1. This guy has a contract. If the company no longer wishes to honour that, they are breaking the contract and he should have the right to a refund.
I'd start my claim at the original price adjusted for inflation, and allow them to barter me down to the original price. I wouldn't accept anything in the way of services from them, because I would never again do business with them. I am not in the habit of rewarding companies that pull shit like this.
I could guess, but until we see the actual algorithms they use (i.e. never) that's all it would be. Insurance companies tend to have pretty good data on what kind of behaviour gets you involved in accidents, so I wouldn't be so quick to assume they'll be idiots about it.
Let's examine their motivation for a moment...
They want to raise the premium for those that lodge a lot of insurance claims. I.e. those that get into a lot of accidents. Granted they SAY the opposite - that they want to lower the premiums for safe drivers, but that's pretty much the same thing in company speak: lower the premiums for those who are rarely involved in accidents, bump prices for everyone, those that are rarely in accidents don't complain because they still pay less, and those that are more often in accidents... well.
Anyway, the users motivation is to be rarely in accidents. Granted, if you answer it impulsively you'd say you want to pay less for your insurance, but in the end it's the same thing. Those that drive in a way that is involved in fewer accidents will get rewarded, thus you want to drive in a way that gets you involved in fewer accidents... according to the insurance company. Who, by all rights, should know... after all next to the police they have the biggest databases ever on any accidents, causes, situations, cars involved and everything like that.
So really, the only way they would give a good score to that half deaf half blind guy who pulls out in traffic infront of you and refuses to speed up, is if his behaviour is less likely to cause an accident than yours. I trust them to be right in this, because they are motivated to be right - if they are wrong they get less money from high risk people, thus making them lose money overall. It's in their own best interest to be right.
And it's in your best interest to slow the fuck down when you're passing an on-ramp or crossroads, so you don't have to step on the breaks quite so often... Like someone once told me "If you keep getting hit by lightning, maybe you should consider not climbing trees in story weather." Or in other words, if this happens so often to you specifically, perhaps it's not so much them but you that can change your behaviour for a safer driving environment for all of us. Of course I couldn't say for sure, since I have no insight in you, your driving style, your environment, and all that...
But the insurance company will.
Yes, it is indeed a foregone conclusion that the attacker will break first, if the company/entity they are attacking is anything but small to mid sized. Anything larger than that should be able to absorb the costs you talk about as a roadbump. A significant loss, quite possibly, but in business school they taught us to always be prepared for unexpected loss.
Your hosting provider won't let you sit back and wait? Do they also hold you responsible for lightning strikes? I think you need to switch hosting providers. As far as I understand it they fall into two categories relevant to this topic: Page Hosting, which means you're small enough that this should indeed hurt you... in which case they can just shut your page down while it happens - anything beyond that is their problem, you're paying them to handle the network side of things. Or Server Hosting, in which case the server side problem is yours, and the network side problem is still theirs. The only thing your hosting provider could realistically complain about here is transfer - i.e. you'd be paying for more bandwidth. This is already regulated in contract, so basically if you have a machine that can handle the traffic then it would be just dandy to sit back and wait it out, as long as you can absorb the extra transferage fees.
Of course I'm not saying that's the best idea. The best idea is to do what people do today, try to filter the traffic, while pursuing legal options to try and track down the origin and shut it down. The next best idea in my opinion is to just pull the plug for the duration. Let the "big scary hacker" blow and blow and get his street cred for bringing you down, and then just flick the switch, back up, good as new. I'd recommend combining this with researching the attacks however, so you can be ready to filter them out with little effort should he try a second time... but in reality the attention span of these people is about the lifecycle of a gnat.
Fair enough, for an extremely small subset of sites I can see how it would have a worrisome impact on their bottom line, namely as you mentioned betting sites if properly timed. I'm sure there are one or two other use-cases I'm missing, but the point remains... DDoS has become the hammer of the "angry child on the internet" toolbox. To them, every problem looks like a nail. To most of us, we just roll our eyes at them and get on with our lives. Maybe we have some interesting discussions on internet security or such, but all in all it's a non-issue.
It's like beating their chest and bragging because they argued with the cashier at McDonald's for thirty minutes, delaying her giving service to anyone else. Did they piss some people off? Quite possibly. But you can bet the vast majority of them don't hold McDonald's liable for "that guy's" childish actions. There's always going to be a "that guy", and there is always going to be a McDonald's. Argue/DDoS until you fall down dead from exhaustion, the moment you're gone it'll be "Next Customer, Please."
While I'm a rather happy pirate and pirate supporter, I don't think you can quite count it as "merely linking" if you actively source pirated material to link to. The flimsy excuse the pirate bay has for instance is that it's "just an indexing site" and can just as happily be used for legal material... when you are going out and looking for pirated stuff to link to, "merely" leaves the table.
Also I might just be tired, but the summary makes it seem like he got four years out of a maximum of two possible - that's not the case. He got 4 years out of a maximum of TEN possible according to the articles I've seen about it.
And now I feel all dirty for having to take the wrong side in this argument. I wish people would understand that if we stopped using hyperbole and chest thumping tactics we'd win on default in the eyes of the public. With articles like this, misrepresenting facts, twisting words, transparent agendas... That's as low and useless as the *AA tactics we oppose.
I need a shower, proceed with the discussion without me.
How about childish, old fashioned, pointless?
I mean seriously, even if you manage to "kill" a large entity on the internet with a DDoS, all you do is give them more publicity and a few hours of people going "What? Where did it go? Oh, I'll check again to see if it works later." Shut a site down for days, keep it troubled for weeks, and you've expended great amounts of resources at.... giving them more publicity. If you've caused them any pain it's miniscule, they've regrouped, patched a few systems, installed a couple of load balancers, whatever it is they do... and then they are back. And the attack is over.
It always ends.
The only entity that a DDoS could be expected to be truly effective against would be one too small to be worth using it against.
Short for Quantum Rectal Code.
It's complicated. All about qubits, existing in two states at once, and giant rectennas in uncomfortable places.
Well, there isn't a perfect answer, because as others have mentioned the list would be another one in five years, or in ten, and so on. Basically if you live in southern europe, you have a lot of "up" to go to, thinking about places that are better choices financially, politically, to raise families in or just to have a tech career in. You should consider the next thing: how hard is it going to be to emigrate?
If you are within the EU, you can pack your bags and drive to another EU country, get a place to live, and you basically only have to sign some papers within three months and get a job. That's it. The simplicity of this process compared to having to get a job in advance, apply for residency and work permits with the help of your employer, and all that shite that you'd have to do in most other places makes it a huge advantage. So the question then becomes, what's the most stable economy in EU? Well, none of them, because they're all in the EU.
I'm from Sweden myself, and I'm considering moving elsewhere in the EU later, for other reasons, so I have other concerns... however for you, I'd recommend scandinavia. Specifically because if you move to Sweden for instance, and then live here for a while, getting a swedish citizenship... then you can move to Norway afterwards through the agreements that the scandinavian countries has with each other. Norway has their own oil money, good stable finances, beautiful nature, and all that, and are not in the EU. If your worst worry is financial collapse, then that's probably a decent place to be. You might be able to move there directly of course, but not as easily.
I suppose you could also move to the border of Sweden and work in Norway - a lot of people around here do that. Better pay, lower living costs.
But there's no magic bullet... you're going to have to weigh the pros and cons here. For all you know in 20 years the place you live might be the financial hub of europe.
Proving my point in other posts. Quote from wikipedia: "Newzbin is a British Usenet indexing website, intended to facilitate access to content on Usenet. The site has caused controversy over its stance on copyrighted material".
Operating under this domain is inviting scrutiny from the authorities and other parties, so only people who are already operating fringe businesses or straight out illegal ones would be (should be) interested.
Well, while my mother certainly wouldn't have minded - she as I was of the opinion that swearing is for emphasis and to be reserved for such - no, I wasn't swearing at my mother at age 8. Especially not in English since I never spoke that to her. I did a paraphrased idiomatic translation to express the general level such replies would have had.
So sorry if that left you confused.
I personally disagree, for the simple reason that the choice of doing nothing is still a choice. Fate, chance, his noodly appendage, whatever the reason you've been put in a situation where your actions decide if 10 people die or 1. It's not about deciding what's best for someone else because no matter what you choose, you've disappointed some people. The family of the child, or the ten families of the railworkers.
Like I said, it's a very common choice to do nothing, and people justify it in many different ways... but when it comes right down to it it's just based on the fallacy that doing nothing isn't an action. It is an action, it's the action of turning away, of keep walking, of ignoring the fact that ten people are going to die because you did nothing.
I actually had quite an interesting conversation about this with some behavioural scientists a few years back, which basically reached the conclusion that this is in fact one of the biggest factors holding us back in life. Choosing non-action due to this psychological fallacy applies even in cases where noone dies. It's what causes most people to not intervene when a crime is happening, it's what causes most people to not take a chance because they don't think they can make it so why bother trying, basically it's what is holding us all back.
If every human pulled the lever, killing the child, saving ten families the pain and suffering, then we as a race would be better off.
But then that's not in the human nature, so we'll have to live with what we've got.
It doesn't seem you quite grasped my post, even though you indeed must have skimmed through most of it. To just summarize I can point out as I already has the flaw in your last paragraph here - in other countries with higher participation nothing changes either - while the numbers of people involved increase, the percentage of them that are engaged, competent, educated, halfway sane, stays about the same. Since politics is a game of percentages you'd have to change this fact rather than just the amount of people involved.
And as for facts of basic human nature, no I'm not going to bother justify that claim: rather than have me sit here for a few days talking about the more in depth studies of sociology, just assume I'm full of crap and take a look around you. Do you see any evidence, anywhere, that people when left to their own devices (i.e. for instance anonymously on the internet, in the comments of slashdot, in crowds milling down the street) that the majority of these people want to engage themselves in the actual improvement of their community/site/context?
Sure you'll hear a lot of people asking for improvements, but how many do you see backing those that do something? A lot of people? That's great. Now how many is that percentually if you include every visitor and lurker and passer-by? Not quite so impressive?
Now that's the observable behaviour of humans today. It could be argued whether or not this is an aspect of basic human behaviour or not, of basic human nature, but it's what we got. If you want to argue how we can change that, well then we're not talking about making a government work any more, then we're talking about how to change the world into a better place.
There are improvements that can be made sure, but then there is also a lot of things that end up in fairy-tale land. We could probably argue for a long time about what would go where.
Well, first off I'm not american so any analysis I make of your system is coming from an outside view. However I have been politically active and interested in the sociology of politics. As such I can emphatically say that I don't believe such a system exists, and furthermore I don't believe a such system CAN exist, because it goes against several basic facts about human nature.
So I would disagree that the US system could function that way - just as much that I would disagree that any other system could. Not in a real world situation. Many political systems seem really good on paper, but in reality we don't exist in a vacuum. There are outside influences, there are nutjobs, there is hunger, mental disorders, other societies to compete with, financial interests, personal problems, all the way down to being really tired one morning and pressing the wrong button when you vote. These things happen, and the sum of all this, the sum of the fact that we are human and not perfect, means that no perfect system can ever exist. The best we can hope for is pretty much what we've got. We can change it around a bit, but add some here and lose some there...
As for my best argument against you, it's right there in the first sentence of your last paragraph. "What it would take is a fully engaged and educated electorate."
Sorry, it's not in the human nature for every individual to be engaged in politics, nor for every person to be educated. There will always be some people who want to change the world yet know nothing about it, and some people who might know a lot yet choose to ignore it completely and sit at home. And some people who vote for the other guy because he has a nicer wife. Or whatever. Even around here where a lot more people vote than in the US, it really doesn't matter. The fraction of stupidity remains about the same. (Write ins for the donald duck party is always popular.)
The point is very simple... if we want a system that actually works, it has to be one that deals with the fact that most people don't care, most people couldn't agree even if they did care, and a whole lot of them will argue about things just because they feel like it, and if their neighbour has something they want it's about fifty fifty whether they'll argue that they should get it as well, or that the neighbour should lose it. Humans are humans. Rationality, education, political engagement... as a species these things are not high up on our list. It's for a small clique of us, really.
Actually I do count them out. It's an unlikely market at best, and what little of it do exist won't be wanting to pay for the amount of traffic/page rank and so on that those domains likely have accrued. And no serious hardcorce gamer site would be unaware of the domains background, which means they'd pretty much be paying a lot of money just to guarantee that they are from day one linked to illegal activities. Not that they do anything illegal, no... But that people have a reasonable suspicion that they might, that they might condone it, or whatever. It doesn't take a genius to see that the only people who can safely and comfortably use the name are those who are already operating on the fringe of the law, and thus have procedures in place for dealing with that.
Sounds like shady marketers would be the only ones who would actually want it, after all for the rest of us it's just an open invitation for various agencies to start digging for dirt on us. If getting caught for torrenting small amounts of pirated goods is about as likely as getting hit by lightning, then buying this domain would be akin to climbing up onto the highest building around during a lightningstorm wearing your special copper-clad "protection from girls +3" homemade armour and swinging a long copper rod angrily at the skies.
Well yes, as you see in the last paragraph of the post you're quoting I don't believe in centralized government, for that exact reason. However those tendencies would indeed be beneficial in a high ranking politician, if we assume we could magically believe they were actually there to do good and not for their own benefit.
I suppose there is a longshot - if we could model a government that actually rewarded people for benefitting the society and punished - i.e. rejected, threw out, those that acted primarily in their own interest - then a sociopath would be the best one for the position. He would act in the best interest of society because that would at that point be in his or her own best interest. People are funny like that, some people do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
Of course I don't believe such a system exists.
It could be argued that it's also required. After all it comes down to the old psychological quiz... a train is out of control. You're standing right next to a lever that will change it's path. Down the path it is currently going ten men are working on the tracks, and will be killed if you don't throw the switch. However if you do throw the switch, the train will barrel down the next tracks, where a child is playing.
A high ranking politician has to be able to weigh those things dispassionately, calculate the loss to society as a whole from ten men (how old are they, how much do they benefit/cost the society?) versus one child (what can that child achieve, does it have a good or bad start in life, how much bad publicity will be caused by its death? - and yes, the last one matters, because bad publicity will affect the politicians possibilities to save ten more men the next day.)
Psychologists have found that when given a choice like that, many of us rather do nothing. We don't want blood on our hands by our own action, we feel less bad if it's by inaction. That's because these are people with empathy who will think of the first as a murder committed by us and the second as a tragic accident. The fact that we could have cut suffering from ten families to one by the throw of a switch... well, that doesn't carry into it for us.
Empathy is not always a good thing. High military command and high political command are two places where, for better or worse, it's a drawback. Those places need cold objectivity and goal oriented thinking... Of course then we come down to what goals someone is actually pursuing, but that's a whole other argument...
Note that I personally am against centralized government, partially because of this reason. Positions of power attracts, feeds, and needs exactly the kind of people in them that we wouldn't want there. Doesn't matter if it's a democracy or a dictatorship, when you're looking for someone to lead millions of people, then normal people won't step up to the plate. And if they try, they get run over by those that are better at it... the sociopaths, amongst others.
Yeah, I've seen some info on that and it seems pretty neat - I'm sure it will get a lot of followers.
For my personal use I'd still prefer not to have one - or not to use it once I upgrade to a reader that has it. When I'm away from steady electricity for a long time then it's easier to carry a spare pair of AA batteries for a portable camping light than it is to carry some backup power source for the reader itself. And if the portable camping light gives up the ghost before my kindle does, I can still read by a candle, or during the day, which I wouldn't be able to if I had used the internal backlight until the batteries ran dry.
So it depends on your use-case: for me battery life trumps the convenience of a built in backlight. It will however be nice when I'm actually at home, so for those (likely the majority) that mostly uses their kindle in places where batterylife isn't an issue I can see how it's a great addition.
Huh, there you go, I did not know that. I mean I still have no clue what real world problems get solved by that kind of math, but I know they do. Somehow.
As a friend of mine put it: "I'm just an advanced maths degree away from understanding why anyone would get an advanced maths degree."
No, it most certainly shouldn't. "Because I can" can never be a blanket explanation. There are a lot of things I _can_ do that would be a complete waste of time, and in addition to that there are a lot of things I can do that would be immoral, illegal, or even borderline suicidal to pursuit. "Because I can" is not enough, never has been, and never should be.