Well, according to the TFA: The chips carry an encrypted digital photograph of the passport holder..
Remember everyone, just by going out in public you are letting the world know what you look like! Time to start investing in brown paper bags
You seem to be missing the whole point here. According to logic, it doesn't really matter what contents are being stored on this chip. It could be an encrypted random number for all anyone cares, since (as the GP correctly noted) the very existence of any such embedded data is sufficient to remotely flag the holder of the passport as an American. I can only hope it's unnecessary to point out the many reasons why this is so undesirable.
Backdating means that the strike price on your option is less than it should be. The 'strike price' of stock options is generally the price on the date the option was granted. If the option is backdated to a date when the stock price was lower, then that extra money comes out of the company's profit, and, thus, out of the shareholders' pockets. Instead of rewarding execs for increasing the stock price in the future, backdating rewards them for increasing it in the past. You can argue that they may deserve the extra. However, hiding the compensation in a stock option intentionally misleads investors.
I'm sorry, although your overall point about the shareholders is perfectly valid, you seem to misunderstand this problem on a number of levels. First, the option strike price is almost always higher than the then-currect trading price of the underlying stock; this is what provides the incentive to grow the stock to that level and beyond. Next, the object of this particular investigation is the "expensing" of these options at their full value at the time of their issuance. This has nothing to do with unfairly rewarding the option recipient, and everything to do with cooking the books so as to understate the company's expenses.
When a company grants options to an employee, the company must account for that as an expense on the books. The timing rules are complex, and depend on the vesting schedule among other factors, but backdating the options typically significantly reduces the expenses to be recorded on the books. Indeed this is extremely misleading to shareholders, but not at all for the reasons you mentioned. The recipient of the option hasn't somehow gained any "extra" reward from the past profits; the recipient of the option is in fact totally unaffected by this backdating.
That's why young people drive a lot of the change in the world: they're willing to sit out on the curb to protest things, where people with another twenty years are thinking "I support that, but I don't want to make waves."
...or they're thinking, "I support that, and I would like to make some waves, but it would be very uncomfortable out there, and I would have a sore back for days!"
...or they're thinking, "I support that. I've been there and done that. I've seen and supported decades of this exact kind of protest, and you know what I've learned? It doesn't work; it doesn't change anything."
This is an unneccesary moral delimma for the power user like me, do I help my friend, or do I help Microsoft's bottom line. GM doesn't make you buy another car when you lose your keys.
Tough choice? I think not. You should help your friend understand that, if the computer doesn't work because XP needs to be reinstalled without the media, money needs to be shelled out. That's just the way it goes with Microsoft. Sorry it sucks, but that's the scenario. Maybe next time your friend will think twice before depending upon crappy software from a company that enforces such a practice, or maybe be less careless about losing the original media/license (or counting on a "friend" who would endorse the use of an illegal copy).
Don't get me wrong; I don't support many of the business practices of Microsoft, and I completely understand the desire (not the acting out!) to install illegal copies. But that's exactly why I make damn sure that everybody who asks me understands these practices perfectly. There is no better service I can provide than to give them the knowledge they need to make a fully-informed decision about how and where they spend their hard-earned dollars. If they're in a cruch, your friends need to know it's Microsoft forcing this on them, not you.
Yeah but what about all the people using cracked versions that don't know it. I imagine there's a TON. How many times do you install XP for a friend or something, and instead of telling them they need to cough up $XXX for an intangible license, you just install the cracked version.
I re-read this many times, hoping I misinterpreted. But no, you're actually suggesting that you'll pirate a copy of XP, and don't even bother to explain that fact to your friend. Rather than actually helping, by explaining indeed the fact is that they do need to cough up $XXX for a license, you stash stolen goods on their machine without their knowledge or consent. Further, you directly lead to the ignorance of this issue, by glossing over the idea of a worthless license, placing Windows on equal footing with non-pay software, without any disadvantage. Some "friend" you are.
Every time I help somebody with Windows, I go out of my way to ensure the person knows exactly how much they need to pay Billy G and company to get legal. As the "computer expert" they ask to help, it's not your place to promulgate the fantasy that Windows software is free of charge. Doing so makes you a very big part of the problem with WGA as a whole!
Windows software is not even close to free of charge, but if you don't help the clueless user realize this, you're keeping them ignorant, and not helping them make an informed decision. Unlike the zealots, I advocate making informed decisions, weighing cost with benefit of choosing Windows or an alternative. Windows is a viable option in some cases, but not all. You, whether intentionally or ignorantly, are fueling the fire.
Perhaps if, instead of imposing your pirating on your friends, you were to tell them the truth, it might be better for everybody. Explain that to fix their problem with XP will cost $XXX. However, to fix their problem with some Linux flavor will cost them $0. Explain to them clearly the trade-offs. Describe what will and will not be the same, what they will and will not be able to do, but let them decide how much XP is worth, and let them feel the pain of paying a large sum of money for crappy software.
Sure the user is using illegal software, but you can really blame them when they genuinely have no idea?
No, in the case you describe I actually blame you, and everybody else like you who would agree that the service you provide your friends is defensible in any way.
Its called marketing. Put a hare-brained idea out there and get people writing articles mentioning your company name.
...Unless, that is, they get your company name wrong! It's Procter & Gamble (not Proctor & Gamble). TFA gets it wrong as well, but that's probably why the company has mostly been using just P&G lately. Not that it matters much; we've apparently degenerated into a society that doesn't value spelling anyway.
I wish I could bitch about the high costs of my adsl line / cable connection.
I'm not sure whether you're seriously looking for alternatives, but IDSL is an ISDN-based DSL service. You get 144kbps with practically no distance limits, typically for around $100/month. It's not a great deal in terms of cost per bandwidth, and it's seldom advertised so you have to find a cooperative ISP, but at least it's another option you could try.
Unfortunately just last month Verisign announced its intentions to purchase GeoTrust. It might suck for any GeoTrust resellers, as Verisign was never very supportive of their resellers.
...you should enter a field that society values more.
Among other somewhat snide remarks, this point probably has more underlying truth than you could possibly imagine.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line society (especially in the US, but elsewhere as well) turned its collective back on teaching as a great and noble profession, and relegated it to an abysmal status. Society itself cannot continue to thrive or grow without an efficient and effective means to educate each generation at least to the level of the previous generation.
I'd guess that slashdotters in general are inherently more likely to have believed that most of their teachers were worthless at best, and a hindrance at worst. Thus respect (and sympathy) was lost for this profession, somewhat ironically among the best and brightest students.
Again consider a field that society values more. When a society believes a field is not valuable, it inevitably reduces salaries. This necessarily yields poorer results, as the better would-be teachers will quickly realize this and simply abandon the craft in favor of a more rewarding career. Society is thus eventually left with an even poorer crop of teachers, re-emphasizing the already low valuation of the career. And so the decline continues.
The parent mentioned that the teachers he/she knows are in it because they love what they do. Unfortunately, that's not reason enough to raise the pay
You're absolutely correct. The reason to raise pay is that society critically needs to place more value on this profession, before it spirals downward in a vicious cycle, and we are left in not too many generations with educators who are nothing more than large-scale babysitters, and with an essentially uneducated mass of unskilled workers barely capable of maintaining our own infrastructure.
While I can understand the difficulty they're in, I don't necessarily sympathize.
Whether you sympathize with individuals in this career or not is largely irrelevant, as long as you can understand (and hopefully agree) that their profession as a whole is in dire need of help in terms of its value to society. Many of them perceive this as a crisis upon us, in much the same way we here perceive threats to, for example, our rights to electronic privacy.
We think ourselves noble for fighting the good fight, and lobbying for what is right. Meanwhile there are a few teachers out there putting their careers where their ideals are, despite the hideously low pay and utter lack of respect (and occasional comtempt) all in order to better society despite itself.
But this relatively small minority of well-intentioned teachers is far from sufficient to keep this cycle from its dismal progression. And that--to respond directly to your previous point--is indeed reason enough to attempt to increase their value in society, and make their pay commensurate with that respect.
If you don't trust the courts to work properly, then your issue is much bigger than this request/legislation.
Despite your intended meaning, truer words have never been written. Indeed, as you might have noticed, many of believe there might just be a much bigger problem here. So what exactly should we do about it? Well, I figure it makes a whole lot of sense to start by rallying support against this particular request/litigation. That's what this whole democracy thing is supposed to be all about, no? Write your representatives; make sure they actually represent you, and vote them out if they don't.
Worried by that?
Actually yes, and I take it you're not.
Don't prey on children and don't plan terrorist acts and you'll be fine.
Ok, I know now why you're not worried. I guess we're all safe then. The government shall protect us from all the bad people. Ah, the good old "if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear" rhetoric. I'll see your trite remark, and raise with a "let them put cameras in every room of your house" counter. By the way, it's not at all a bluff; I don't think you've been paying much attention to the control some parts of the government have been trying to exert over the populace (yes, I said control; ubiquitous monitoring is a natural first step).
It's easy to see why pro-stats packages people might have an agenda (e.g. they might work for a company selling snake oil), but what could I possibly gain from criticising the results?
Your agenda, apparently, is to argue. Some people thrive on this. Perhaps to prove a point, perhaps to feel important, perhaps because you feel ripped off or betrayed or left out as the only one who can't see what others are seeing. We're actually trying to help, but your argumentative style is getting in the way. If you don't mean to do this, I can't help beyond pointing it out; if it's intentional, well, here's one last laugh of a reply for you.
* I'm wrong because... well I'm too stupid to understand the explanation, so I'm just going to have to trust you.
No, if you had actually bothered to carefully read my post, rather than jump to argue and defend yourself, you'd notice I explicitly mentioned you shouldn't trust me (or anybody else, for that matter) and that you should go educate yourself regarding statistics. Search google, read a book, take a class, etc. There are many ways you can learn, but if you go in with a closed mind, it will be a long uphill battle.
What do all of these responses have in common?
Quite frankly they indicate to me that you are either baiting us for sport (trolling) or you're honestly having significant troubles with your communication skills. This is not meant as an attack--although I'm guessing you'll take it as such--it's just an observation.
They don't actually explain why what I am saying is wrong, they just attack me or are simply non-sequiturs.
I did bother to explain; again you're either having trouble communicating your own viewpoint to us, or we're all just ignorant of your insight that is so clearly beyond us we are lost.
Feel free to actually talk specifics, but leave the pointless red herrings and personal attacks out of it.
Here again, I did mention specifics. Go learn about the products from SAS Institute (I even provided a link for crying out loud) and maybe you'll understand it was not at all pointless. I don't have anything to do with them, except as a user of their products from long ago. Still, you don't have to trust their literature at all, but of you will need at least an introductory level of statistics under your belt before you'll understand why it can be relevant. Despite your qualitative/intuitive arguments to the contrary (which, by the way, you've provide nothing but hand-waving to support) there are a plethora of well-known techniques avaiable to cull trends out of noisy data. As I mentioned, the very existence of the field of radio-astronomy belies your assertions; it would be a futile field of science if your arguments were mathematically sound.
You're clearly not "too stupid" to learn this stuff, but you are most certainly ill-informed on this subject. None of us can force knowledge into your head; when you see lots of otherwise helpful people getting frustrated while trying to explain something to you, it's because you are communicating to us (perhaps, unintentionally; we can't know for certain) that you are unwilling to listen to reason. If you are willing to reason, don't trust me, don't trust any other respondent; just please, please go read a textbook or two (no, not product literature; you wouldn't and shouldn't trust that anyway) and try to learn about this very interesting subject before looking at the various products, and only then should you reply.
Your "requirements" seem to be all over the map. If you want redundancy, that's one thing. If you want simply to scale, that's quite another thing. If you want partitioning, that's yet a different problem.
Then, ask yourself what kind of traffic you are handling. If you're looking at users surfing the web, you probably needn't be overly concerned with load balancing; if you're receiving tons of inbound traffic to your servers, on the other hand, not only do you need load balancing, but you probably also need to seriously consider co-location solutions for your servers.
The adminstrative traffic is typically a much lower priority in most companies. I don't know how many users you're talking about, or what they're doing, but most small companies just live with a single (full) T1 until they absolutely need to bond another T1 (where "need" is subject, but should be kept in check, especially given that last bit about not having unlimited funding).
I guess this is not much of an answer, but these are all important questions you need to be asking yourself well before seeking specific answers. I'm not sure where you're coming from, and I don't mean to accuse you of anything, but taking the approach that you'll know the right answer when you see it is usually flawed from the start.
It costs less than half of that to register yourself a unique service mark or trademark in a couple relevant classes. It's just as intangible, and you do need to do some research up front, but it keeps its value far better than any domain name. It can take months to complete the process, but if you've done your research the process itself is painless and can be done almost entirely online. As an added bonus, if your registration is successful you can petition ICANN to transfer any (new) infringing domain names to you, as the rightful owner of the mark (you can't necessarily grab existing infringing domains as far as I know, but then again you're going to look for a better name anyway, right? Yes, I thought so).
Buying a Nolo book on legal protection is definitely well worth the $30-$50 investment, and the knowledge gained will carry over to any new businesses you might decide to start. Don't even consider paying a huge chunk of hard-earned money for a domain name without at least understanding the basics of legal rights that do (and don't) convey with it.
That's just it - events like this look identical to a drop in visitors.
No they don't. It's very easy to determine whether AOL has suddenly proxy-cached your site, and to differentiate that from a sudden fundamental drop in the actual number of visitors arriving at your site from AOL. There are both technical (meaning carefully crafting your site to collect better raw data) and mathematical (meaning sophisticated analysis of existing historical, current, and ongoing future data) approaches to this. Even intuitively one can easily imagine that the data patterns might have inherent differences; consider the trivial case of comparing your site statistics with another unrelated control site, and finding both sites showed the same decrease in AOL hits at the same time. Google "scientific method" and apply what you find to this problem. It's not nearly as intractable a problem as you might imagine.
And even if you could tell when an event like this happens - how are you going to account for them? You don't know how much they are affecting your numbers, because (for example) a single cache could be serving your resources to ten people or a hundred thousand.
Look, at first I thought you might have been intelluctually curious, but it's clear to me now that you've got an agenda and you're just trolling to prove your point. It would take hours to explain it to you, assuming you'd even care to listen rather than argue. I'm sorry, but the simple truth here is that you apparently lack sufficient knowledge to debate this question on any useful level. Seriously, go take an advanced course on statistics at a local university, go to your library, or just consult google.
The thing is, most people use "sufficiently robust statistical techniques" as a synonym for "I'll ignore the sources of error I can't account for". If you think you can do better than this, then please point out how (and which stats packages do this).
Gee, I guess you don't suppose that maybe I'm not one of those "most people" you mention. Of course I'm not talking about something rudimentary like AWStats or anything similar. While those are indeed useful on their own, they are incredibly limited. You're right that, using only these primitive tools, you're not going to be able to readily account for any unexpected variances. However, the raw log data can be analyzed by any of a vast number of statistical analysis and/or data mining packages. To specifically respond to your quaint challenge, please check out SAS.
Again, please do yourself a favor and get some education in statistics. I'm not going to waste my time to "point out how" but that doesn't invalidate any of my previous statements. You may be pleasantly surpised to find there's more to the world of numbers than counting and computing averages. Your intuition about statistics, and your assumptions about what is possible, are both faling you.
As a sibling poster mentioned, your only making yourself look ignorant; you're not demonstrating a willingness to learn. Or, of course, you could choose to remain ignorant and continually marvel as to why so many companies are spending so much time and money on a set of totally flawed assumptions, and why they just can't see things as clearly as you can.
Sorry, no. Let's say that AOL tune their caching parameters and all of a sudden a hundred thousand of your visitors get a page from AOL's cache instead of from your server. The "trend" will show a massive decrease in visitors, even if the number of visitors you have remains static.
Sorry, but yes. You can easily account for large events like this when you see them. If these changes happen to coincide with some recent marketing campaign it can be tricky, of course, to analyze the source of the variances, but certainly not impossible. Your confidence level in your findings will no doubt decrease, but generally not so significantly as to render the data useless. The continual and otherwise-random (or at least chaotic) variations in the underlying fabric of the Internet that affect your raw data collection do not completely neutralize your ability to filter the signal from the noise.
Looking at the difference between two incorrect numbers will not result in a correct number.
Correct, no; but useful, yes. Your overall premise--that keeping stats is inherently useless--is quite simply wrong. In fact your position is essentially equivalent to saying that background cosmic radiation makes all radio-astronomy meaningless. There is most certainly value in analyzing trends.
You may choose to disagree, continue to wonder why other people seem to care, and chide them about the futility of their task; or you can perhaps acknowledge that maybe this information is more useful than you had presumed, as long as one applies sufficiently robust statistical techniques.
Even if Bob's Software knows about the flaw in Program, they can atleast say with a straight face that they had no idea it existed. Once you announce in publically, they have been officially notified that the flaw exists.
That's all quite true.
At that point, anything serious that happens, say Program causes some other company to lose lots of money, puts Bob's Software as a responsible party for allowing this known flaw to exist.
And, if software were like any other tangible (and most intangible) products/services in the world, you would be correct here as well. Unfortunately it's not, so you're not. Why? Those lovely click-wrap EULA licenses explicitly and specifically disclaim all liability, including even fitness for purpose. Look at almost any EULA out there and you'll see that usually the most you could possibly recover, even if this software somehow manages to kill you, through gross negligence or otherwise, is the price you paid for it.
Of course, Bob's Software doesn't want to part with your money, so your point is still partially valid. However, I think we shouldn't overlook the fact that we're not talking about huge product liability lawsuits, and yet they're treating disclosures as if we were. Basically they're trying to have their cake (EULA dislaimers) and eat it (prevent disclosures) too.
They would, it seems, be doing fairly well at both right now.
if they are inhabited, they might have heard our radio and tv broadcasts.
I realize you were citing Contact, but consider that inhabitants of said planet would be watching on TV right now. They're only about four years away from seeing a broadcast of our first moon landing.
...to hear that this happed to someone who played WoW for 12 hours.
There's a related story about an otherwise healthy teenager developing DVT after only 10 hours playing on a game console.
No word on any lawsuit, but the doctor is quoted as saying "However, it doesn't mean that the government should be putting health warnings on Playstations."
If I want something, I'll go seek it out for myself. Leave me the hell alone. It's not your place to constantly bother me.
...does not imply this...
In general, if people want something, they will seek it out for themselves.
...unless you happen to be the sole embodiment of every consumer in the world. See Hasty Generalization for more details.
Look, I'm with you. I hate this stuff as much as you. It's usually even a nice safe rant for a few insightful mods, but yours is practically a troll.
I can assure you that there are quite a few hundred thousand consumers out there who do not share our outlook on this subject, who become very hostile when you fail to keep them informed of important information, and who couldn't set up an RSS reader if their lives depended on it.
Sorry, I'd love to live in that fantasy world, but you have to face that it's just not reflective of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, according to the TFA: The chips carry an encrypted digital photograph of the passport holder..
Remember everyone, just by going out in public you are letting the world know what you look like! Time to start investing in brown paper bags
You seem to be missing the whole point here. According to logic, it doesn't really matter what contents are being stored on this chip. It could be an encrypted random number for all anyone cares, since (as the GP correctly noted) the very existence of any such embedded data is sufficient to remotely flag the holder of the passport as an American. I can only hope it's unnecessary to point out the many reasons why this is so undesirable.
When a company grants options to an employee, the company must account for that as an expense on the books. The timing rules are complex, and depend on the vesting schedule among other factors, but backdating the options typically significantly reduces the expenses to be recorded on the books. Indeed this is extremely misleading to shareholders, but not at all for the reasons you mentioned. The recipient of the option hasn't somehow gained any "extra" reward from the past profits; the recipient of the option is in fact totally unaffected by this backdating.
That's why young people drive a lot of the change in the world: they're willing to sit out on the curb to protest things, where people with another twenty years are thinking "I support that, but I don't want to make waves."
This is an unneccesary moral delimma for the power user like me, do I help my friend, or do I help Microsoft's bottom line. GM doesn't make you buy another car when you lose your keys.
Tough choice? I think not. You should help your friend understand that, if the computer doesn't work because XP needs to be reinstalled without the media, money needs to be shelled out. That's just the way it goes with Microsoft. Sorry it sucks, but that's the scenario. Maybe next time your friend will think twice before depending upon crappy software from a company that enforces such a practice, or maybe be less careless about losing the original media/license (or counting on a "friend" who would endorse the use of an illegal copy).
Don't get me wrong; I don't support many of the business practices of Microsoft, and I completely understand the desire (not the acting out!) to install illegal copies. But that's exactly why I make damn sure that everybody who asks me understands these practices perfectly. There is no better service I can provide than to give them the knowledge they need to make a fully-informed decision about how and where they spend their hard-earned dollars. If they're in a cruch, your friends need to know it's Microsoft forcing this on them, not you.
I re-read this many times, hoping I misinterpreted. But no, you're actually suggesting that you'll pirate a copy of XP, and don't even bother to explain that fact to your friend. Rather than actually helping, by explaining indeed the fact is that they do need to cough up $XXX for a license, you stash stolen goods on their machine without their knowledge or consent. Further, you directly lead to the ignorance of this issue, by glossing over the idea of a worthless license, placing Windows on equal footing with non-pay software, without any disadvantage. Some "friend" you are.
Every time I help somebody with Windows, I go out of my way to ensure the person knows exactly how much they need to pay Billy G and company to get legal. As the "computer expert" they ask to help, it's not your place to promulgate the fantasy that Windows software is free of charge. Doing so makes you a very big part of the problem with WGA as a whole!
Windows software is not even close to free of charge, but if you don't help the clueless user realize this, you're keeping them ignorant, and not helping them make an informed decision. Unlike the zealots, I advocate making informed decisions, weighing cost with benefit of choosing Windows or an alternative. Windows is a viable option in some cases, but not all. You, whether intentionally or ignorantly, are fueling the fire.
Perhaps if, instead of imposing your pirating on your friends, you were to tell them the truth, it might be better for everybody. Explain that to fix their problem with XP will cost $XXX. However, to fix their problem with some Linux flavor will cost them $0. Explain to them clearly the trade-offs. Describe what will and will not be the same, what they will and will not be able to do, but let them decide how much XP is worth, and let them feel the pain of paying a large sum of money for crappy software.
Sure the user is using illegal software, but you can really blame them when they genuinely have no idea?
No, in the case you describe I actually blame you, and everybody else like you who would agree that the service you provide your friends is defensible in any way.
Actually it's called a gerund, which is typically any noun made from appending "ing" to a verb. It's correctly a noun, as in, "Texting is fun."
Unfortunately just last month Verisign announced its intentions to purchase GeoTrust. It might suck for any GeoTrust resellers, as Verisign was never very supportive of their resellers.
Here's the press release.
Among other somewhat snide remarks, this point probably has more underlying truth than you could possibly imagine.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line society (especially in the US, but elsewhere as well) turned its collective back on teaching as a great and noble profession, and relegated it to an abysmal status. Society itself cannot continue to thrive or grow without an efficient and effective means to educate each generation at least to the level of the previous generation.
I'd guess that slashdotters in general are inherently more likely to have believed that most of their teachers were worthless at best, and a hindrance at worst. Thus respect (and sympathy) was lost for this profession, somewhat ironically among the best and brightest students.
Again consider a field that society values more. When a society believes a field is not valuable, it inevitably reduces salaries. This necessarily yields poorer results, as the better would-be teachers will quickly realize this and simply abandon the craft in favor of a more rewarding career. Society is thus eventually left with an even poorer crop of teachers, re-emphasizing the already low valuation of the career. And so the decline continues.
The parent mentioned that the teachers he/she knows are in it because they love what they do. Unfortunately, that's not reason enough to raise the pay
You're absolutely correct. The reason to raise pay is that society critically needs to place more value on this profession, before it spirals downward in a vicious cycle, and we are left in not too many generations with educators who are nothing more than large-scale babysitters, and with an essentially uneducated mass of unskilled workers barely capable of maintaining our own infrastructure.
While I can understand the difficulty they're in, I don't necessarily sympathize.
Whether you sympathize with individuals in this career or not is largely irrelevant, as long as you can understand (and hopefully agree) that their profession as a whole is in dire need of help in terms of its value to society. Many of them perceive this as a crisis upon us, in much the same way we here perceive threats to, for example, our rights to electronic privacy.
We think ourselves noble for fighting the good fight, and lobbying for what is right. Meanwhile there are a few teachers out there putting their careers where their ideals are, despite the hideously low pay and utter lack of respect (and occasional comtempt) all in order to better society despite itself.
But this relatively small minority of well-intentioned teachers is far from sufficient to keep this cycle from its dismal progression. And that--to respond directly to your previous point--is indeed reason enough to attempt to increase their value in society, and make their pay commensurate with that respect.
Despite your intended meaning, truer words have never been written. Indeed, as you might have noticed, many of believe there might just be a much bigger problem here. So what exactly should we do about it? Well, I figure it makes a whole lot of sense to start by rallying support against this particular request/litigation. That's what this whole democracy thing is supposed to be all about, no? Write your representatives; make sure they actually represent you, and vote them out if they don't.
Worried by that?
Actually yes, and I take it you're not.
Don't prey on children and don't plan terrorist acts and you'll be fine.
Ok, I know now why you're not worried. I guess we're all safe then. The government shall protect us from all the bad people. Ah, the good old "if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear" rhetoric. I'll see your trite remark, and raise with a "let them put cameras in every room of your house" counter. By the way, it's not at all a bluff; I don't think you've been paying much attention to the control some parts of the government have been trying to exert over the populace (yes, I said control; ubiquitous monitoring is a natural first step).
Your agenda, apparently, is to argue. Some people thrive on this. Perhaps to prove a point, perhaps to feel important, perhaps because you feel ripped off or betrayed or left out as the only one who can't see what others are seeing. We're actually trying to help, but your argumentative style is getting in the way. If you don't mean to do this, I can't help beyond pointing it out; if it's intentional, well, here's one last laugh of a reply for you.
* I'm wrong because... well I'm too stupid to understand the explanation, so I'm just going to have to trust you.
No, if you had actually bothered to carefully read my post, rather than jump to argue and defend yourself, you'd notice I explicitly mentioned you shouldn't trust me (or anybody else, for that matter) and that you should go educate yourself regarding statistics. Search google, read a book, take a class, etc. There are many ways you can learn, but if you go in with a closed mind, it will be a long uphill battle.
What do all of these responses have in common?
Quite frankly they indicate to me that you are either baiting us for sport (trolling) or you're honestly having significant troubles with your communication skills. This is not meant as an attack--although I'm guessing you'll take it as such--it's just an observation.
They don't actually explain why what I am saying is wrong, they just attack me or are simply non-sequiturs.
I did bother to explain; again you're either having trouble communicating your own viewpoint to us, or we're all just ignorant of your insight that is so clearly beyond us we are lost.
Feel free to actually talk specifics, but leave the pointless red herrings and personal attacks out of it.
Here again, I did mention specifics. Go learn about the products from SAS Institute (I even provided a link for crying out loud) and maybe you'll understand it was not at all pointless. I don't have anything to do with them, except as a user of their products from long ago. Still, you don't have to trust their literature at all, but of you will need at least an introductory level of statistics under your belt before you'll understand why it can be relevant. Despite your qualitative/intuitive arguments to the contrary (which, by the way, you've provide nothing but hand-waving to support) there are a plethora of well-known techniques avaiable to cull trends out of noisy data. As I mentioned, the very existence of the field of radio-astronomy belies your assertions; it would be a futile field of science if your arguments were mathematically sound.
You're clearly not "too stupid" to learn this stuff, but you are most certainly ill-informed on this subject. None of us can force knowledge into your head; when you see lots of otherwise helpful people getting frustrated while trying to explain something to you, it's because you are communicating to us (perhaps, unintentionally; we can't know for certain) that you are unwilling to listen to reason. If you are willing to reason, don't trust me, don't trust any other respondent; just please, please go read a textbook or two (no, not product literature; you wouldn't and shouldn't trust that anyway) and try to learn about this very interesting subject before looking at the various products, and only then should you reply.
Then, ask yourself what kind of traffic you are handling. If you're looking at users surfing the web, you probably needn't be overly concerned with load balancing; if you're receiving tons of inbound traffic to your servers, on the other hand, not only do you need load balancing, but you probably also need to seriously consider co-location solutions for your servers.
The adminstrative traffic is typically a much lower priority in most companies. I don't know how many users you're talking about, or what they're doing, but most small companies just live with a single (full) T1 until they absolutely need to bond another T1 (where "need" is subject, but should be kept in check, especially given that last bit about not having unlimited funding).
I guess this is not much of an answer, but these are all important questions you need to be asking yourself well before seeking specific answers. I'm not sure where you're coming from, and I don't mean to accuse you of anything, but taking the approach that you'll know the right answer when you see it is usually flawed from the start.
Buying a Nolo book on legal protection is definitely well worth the $30-$50 investment, and the knowledge gained will carry over to any new businesses you might decide to start. Don't even consider paying a huge chunk of hard-earned money for a domain name without at least understanding the basics of legal rights that do (and don't) convey with it.
No they don't. It's very easy to determine whether AOL has suddenly proxy-cached your site, and to differentiate that from a sudden fundamental drop in the actual number of visitors arriving at your site from AOL. There are both technical (meaning carefully crafting your site to collect better raw data) and mathematical (meaning sophisticated analysis of existing historical, current, and ongoing future data) approaches to this. Even intuitively one can easily imagine that the data patterns might have inherent differences; consider the trivial case of comparing your site statistics with another unrelated control site, and finding both sites showed the same decrease in AOL hits at the same time. Google "scientific method" and apply what you find to this problem. It's not nearly as intractable a problem as you might imagine.
And even if you could tell when an event like this happens - how are you going to account for them? You don't know how much they are affecting your numbers, because (for example) a single cache could be serving your resources to ten people or a hundred thousand.
Look, at first I thought you might have been intelluctually curious, but it's clear to me now that you've got an agenda and you're just trolling to prove your point. It would take hours to explain it to you, assuming you'd even care to listen rather than argue. I'm sorry, but the simple truth here is that you apparently lack sufficient knowledge to debate this question on any useful level. Seriously, go take an advanced course on statistics at a local university, go to your library, or just consult google.
The thing is, most people use "sufficiently robust statistical techniques" as a synonym for "I'll ignore the sources of error I can't account for". If you think you can do better than this, then please point out how (and which stats packages do this).
Gee, I guess you don't suppose that maybe I'm not one of those "most people" you mention. Of course I'm not talking about something rudimentary like AWStats or anything similar. While those are indeed useful on their own, they are incredibly limited. You're right that, using only these primitive tools, you're not going to be able to readily account for any unexpected variances. However, the raw log data can be analyzed by any of a vast number of statistical analysis and/or data mining packages. To specifically respond to your quaint challenge, please check out SAS.
Again, please do yourself a favor and get some education in statistics. I'm not going to waste my time to "point out how" but that doesn't invalidate any of my previous statements. You may be pleasantly surpised to find there's more to the world of numbers than counting and computing averages. Your intuition about statistics, and your assumptions about what is possible, are both faling you.
As a sibling poster mentioned, your only making yourself look ignorant; you're not demonstrating a willingness to learn. Or, of course, you could choose to remain ignorant and continually marvel as to why so many companies are spending so much time and money on a set of totally flawed assumptions, and why they just can't see things as clearly as you can.
Sorry, but yes. You can easily account for large events like this when you see them. If these changes happen to coincide with some recent marketing campaign it can be tricky, of course, to analyze the source of the variances, but certainly not impossible. Your confidence level in your findings will no doubt decrease, but generally not so significantly as to render the data useless. The continual and otherwise-random (or at least chaotic) variations in the underlying fabric of the Internet that affect your raw data collection do not completely neutralize your ability to filter the signal from the noise.
Looking at the difference between two incorrect numbers will not result in a correct number.
Correct, no; but useful, yes. Your overall premise--that keeping stats is inherently useless--is quite simply wrong. In fact your position is essentially equivalent to saying that background cosmic radiation makes all radio-astronomy meaningless. There is most certainly value in analyzing trends.
You may choose to disagree, continue to wonder why other people seem to care, and chide them about the futility of their task; or you can perhaps acknowledge that maybe this information is more useful than you had presumed, as long as one applies sufficiently robust statistical techniques.
Trends.
That's all quite true.
At that point, anything serious that happens, say Program causes some other company to lose lots of money, puts Bob's Software as a responsible party for allowing this known flaw to exist.
And, if software were like any other tangible (and most intangible) products/services in the world, you would be correct here as well. Unfortunately it's not, so you're not. Why? Those lovely click-wrap EULA licenses explicitly and specifically disclaim all liability, including even fitness for purpose. Look at almost any EULA out there and you'll see that usually the most you could possibly recover, even if this software somehow manages to kill you, through gross negligence or otherwise, is the price you paid for it.
Of course, Bob's Software doesn't want to part with your money, so your point is still partially valid. However, I think we shouldn't overlook the fact that we're not talking about huge product liability lawsuits, and yet they're treating disclosures as if we were. Basically they're trying to have their cake (EULA dislaimers) and eat it (prevent disclosures) too.
They would, it seems, be doing fairly well at both right now.
WTF? Is BusinessWeek now somewhere in "the mysterious future" as well?
I realize you were citing Contact, but consider that inhabitants of said planet would be watching on TV right now. They're only about four years away from seeing a broadcast of our first moon landing.
There's a related story about an otherwise healthy teenager developing DVT after only 10 hours playing on a game console.
No word on any lawsuit, but the doctor is quoted as saying "However, it doesn't mean that the government should be putting health warnings on Playstations."
If I want something, I'll go seek it out for myself. Leave me the hell alone. It's not your place to constantly bother me.
In general, if people want something, they will seek it out for themselves.
Look, I'm with you. I hate this stuff as much as you. It's usually even a nice safe rant for a few insightful mods, but yours is practically a troll.
I can assure you that there are quite a few hundred thousand consumers out there who do not share our outlook on this subject, who become very hostile when you fail to keep them informed of important information, and who couldn't set up an RSS reader if their lives depended on it.
Sorry, I'd love to live in that fantasy world, but you have to face that it's just not reflective of reality.
This must be your lucky day. Sun has an RPM package for download; the self-installer generates the .rpm file.