One thing I wish slashdot readers and posters would understand is the difference between argumentum ad absurdum and trolling.
I agree. You might want to see also "secundum quid" (or "Hasty Generalization") while you continue wishing; it is a logical fallacy. The form of "ad absurdum" is a parody of this technique, hence a troll (and I humbly suggest you also review what/. considers a troll before you get mod points).
Unfortunately, you don't get it but the GP does.
Brilliant! Another hasty generalization; another fallacy.
The right to contract's value varies from person to person.
Agreed.
You may as well say the right to be a slave is a valuable part of our "spirit of freedom". Do you believe that someone should be allowed to contract being knocked senseless or infected with AIDS for some sort of renumeration?
WTF? Care to explain how exactly you managed to make this sick interpretation from my posting? Never mind; this must be a troll.
Right to contract is indeed valuable. As noted above (as if I somehow disputed it) rule of law trumps rule of contract. Your examples are against the law. I think I'm also obligated to say something crass like "Thanks for playing."
Now with software, these things are pretty much black boxes. The only way to know what's happening on the inside is to get that information from someone who has inside information.
That's only a small part of it. The bigger problem is fragile (often patented) business models, which form the basis of many tech companies. It's usually not the technology itself they're protecting, it's more often the business models, strategic partners, marketing plans, etc.
The fact that the very foundation of a company can potentially walk out the door in the head of one human sure makes you think twice before investing in any such organization.
...it's a contract. And it's a contract entered knowingly and willingly by both parties. Basically, read the fine print before you take that dream job (note FTFA that he was paid $1 million last year).
Just take one look at any Microsoft EULA, and consider how horrible and one-sided their non-disclosure and non-compete terms must be.
The right to contract is a valuable part of our "spirit of freedom" you mention.
Why would anyone, after clearly being informed NOT to talk about this information, talk about this information ?
One word: Publicity.
Ok, a few more words as well. I don't mean any negative connotation here in the sense of being self-serving, although that is certainly a distinct possibility. Still, if he thought it was an important enough flaw, maybe he's sacrificing himself for the greater good. It's difficult to know his true intentions at this stage, but certainly there are many valid reasons to ignore the will of those whom would censor you.
I'd be more interested in filtering out heat in the summer, and allowing it in during the Winter.
Speaking of which, TFA seems contradictory in this respect. First it says:
Since traditional artificial-light tubes and bulbs emit heat as well as visible light, the use of fiber-optic direct lighting will actually lessen the amount of energy that has to be expended on air conditioning, diminishing the strain on the grid.
Which clearly implies this technology is supposed to emit less heat than bulbs and tubes. But then, later it says:
Given that the visual light from even one fiber is capable of boiling water, there might be a fire hazard from broken fibers if the work is incorrectly or carelessly done, or if a later home renovator were to cut across the installed fibers.
So I thought, well, it might take some time to boil that water they mentioned, but it's a fire hazard as well? That doesn't sound like it's quite as cool as they were implying earlier (especially the title: "Cool Light on Hot Days").
While the pixels adjust their color, the backlight is off, and it will only switch on when the image is ready -- three times brighter than in a normal LCD TV to compensate for the dark period -- before going dark again.
Won't this make the flicker, oh, I don't know, about three times worse? I realize it's three times an LCD, not CRT, but still that seems like it could cause Pokemon-style seizures or something. Like you said, thanks, but no thanks.
You aren't kidding about slim--I've done a successful (text-based) install of Mandrake 9.2 on two Dell Latitude XPi laptops with only 40MB of RAM! This was even a network (NFS) install off of a PC Card NIC, because these ancient laptops don't even have built-in CD-ROMs.
I must be missing the point. So many of these comments are "it's not that much faster" or "it's too expensive" all while comparing this to traditional platter-based disks. Even TFA only had this minor blurb:
With no moving parts, reliability is improved tremendously
Right, maybe you could argue that hard drives don't crash as often as the did in the past, so this is not an issue, but still I'd certainly pay a premium to have zero moving parts. Plus consider the power savings, and the resulting reduction in heat. Oh, and don't forget about the noise reduction as well.
I guess I just feel like everyone saying "it's not that much faster for the cost" is kind of missing a key point (perhaps *the* key point). It seems to me that any speed improvement is just a bonus; it's not like it's any slower than a traditional platter drive.
Except that they actively work around my filters knowingly and aggresively with the mispellings, fake descriptions and ip spoofing nonsense. Anyone who knowingly pesters people on the milions and millions scale has forfeited any sympathy from me.
I don't mean to lash out at you in particular, but I can't believe what I'm reading in this thread. We cheer at Y2K and Daylight Saving Time mods, claiming "it keeps us in business" while meanwhile murdered spammers elicit barely any sympathy because of all the "harm" they have done. Don't any of you IT folks realize that if there weren't any "bad guys" that many of you wouldn't have jobs writing filters, updating virus definitions, and so forth?
Right, this is/. home of the insane moderators, so I feel I must explain that no, I am not trolling, and yes, I hate spam just as much as anybody else. I simply don't understand the hostility here, especially given the (apparently unacknowledged) co-dependencies involved.
I have several of these, including a wrist-watch, and all of them are normally zero maintenance. As if you didn't know, these beasties listen for a NIST radio broadcast signal and synchronize themselves automatically.
Well, the radio signal does not include DST information; that's a "client-side" feature of the clock itself. Most clocks allow you to configure which time zone offset you wish, as well as to specify whether you want the clock to observe DST during the appropriate time of the year.
And therein lies the problem!
I can't exactly "patch" my clocks/watches with an update to handle this absurdity. These aren't exactly field-upgradable. If this goes through, rather than being zero maintenance, each of these timepieces will need to be adjusted 4 times per year!
(Yes--four--go count if you don't believe me: once to compensate for DST starting before the device thinks it should; again to un-compensate upon the traditional DST start; once more to compensate upon the traditional DST end; and finally yet again to un-compensate for the real end of DST.)
So a hacker grabs a bunch of the stolen SSNs...gives one to the credit card company...they find out it is stolen and then refuse the SSN as valid....read access is no problem.
Yes, I know we are talking about a database of stolen SSNs, but read access is indeed a very large problem. Consider the fact that this can easily be used in reverse, as a tool to validate that an SSN is not stolen.
And remember, we're probably talking about every employer in the country having access to this wonderful SSN-validation tool. There's not a lot of hope that this system will not be abused.
I guess I just don't see how this statement: DNS record lookup is a standard adhered to by 99.999% of the internet, and Sender-ID isn't
somhow implied this one: I meant that Sender-ID records need some pretty advanced parsing, whereas A records don't
Look, I don't want to get into a verbal sparring match here, but there are a few points I think you're missing.
First, the A record is no more "DNS friendly" than the TXT record. Second, it's up to hotmail to implement the "advanced" parsing you mention; we just need to publish the TXT record if we want to send email to them. Third, even if you wanted to do so, using Sender-ID to filter inbound is a patented process licensed by MS; publishing the required records for outbound is completely unincumbered and fairly trivial to implement.
I want to be clear than I'm not supporting this MS-sponsored crap, but at least let's at least get the basic facts straight.
FTFA: An unemployment claim that is fraudulently made on a stolen Social Security number would be easier to detect if there were a national database of stolen Social Security numbers.
Right... Hacker target number one. Ah, but maybe they've thought of this.
Again FTFA: If and when a database is created, the only caveat is that it must possess airtight security features.
Right... See, humans will be involved somewhere, and humans can be corrupted just as easily as databases (and perhaps more so). The database will have a lookup function or it's worthless. So who will get access? Only state unemployment offices? How about credit card companies (think MasterCard)? And won't banks want a piece of this, too?
But wait, there's more. What about employers? They certainly wouldn't want to hire somebody who is using a known stolen SSN. Ok, so employers get access. It wouldn't be fair if it weren't every employer, from massive multinationals to the mom-and-pop store on the corner. Every one of these organizations will have the ability to lookup information from this database.
FTFA one last time: At the current time, this initiative isn't even being discussed in the halls of Congress
It's like the old quote, "how much money is enough? A little bit more." Basically, you can't *pay* someone to be honest. If someone is greedy, more money won't satisfy him.
I think human nature is even worse than you imply. As the stakes go up, the greed hormone gets kicked into high gear. The more money they get, the greedier they get. It's a vicious (often self-destructive) cycle.
...and the very fact that a hobbyist can turn their hobby into a business means that patents are bad.
Are you trolling/joking, or did I miss something here? I'm against these idiotic patents as much as you, but certainly not for this particular reason. Some of these "hobbyists" are your best friends; they read slashdot, invent Linux, and do other wonderful things.
You're hopefully suggesting that folks who use baseless patents to turn their hobbies into business are evil, and there I would have to agree completely. Indeed there are abusers of the system, and they should be prosecuted. But I still have to disagree with your major premise. Not affording any type of protection to a hobbyist inventor may very well ensure that the next Big Thing will stay as a hobby, and never see the light of day.
...but not why you may think. One word: Insurance.
As any small business owner will attest, it is incredibly difficult to obtain reasonable business insurance, especially professional liability, and even more so when they don't understand the technology behind your business itself. The reason is that the insurance industry is running scared about terrorism, the great "unknown" world of IT, and our generally vindictive litigious society.
None of these factors are in their actuarial tables, so they presume you're going to cost them millions of dollars. They don't care whether they understand or not; they're simply not willing to take the risk.
Now, how do you suppose the insurance company will treat your small business, if it happens to accept credit cards for payment? Not good.
Do you suppose they'll care how paranoid you are about data security? Will they care how many levels of protection you afford the data of your customers?
The answer is a resounding "no" to all. They don't have the technical acumen to judge what is and what is not appropriate (honestly, too few people who call themselves "security experts" do). And they don't care. They simply raise the rates to astronomical levels, with a big "screw you" attitude, because they're somewhat ironically not at all in the business of taking risks.
Re:DVORAK for real world, SysAdmin/Programming use
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
I piped my shell history (533 lines worth) to a file and ran it through a finger movement calculator. [...] You are moving your fingers around 34% more than a Dvorak administrator, at least if you're using commands similar to mine.
I'm curious though how skewed this figure is, due to the fact that you probably use special keys (tab, escape, up arrow) to auto-complete file/directory names or repeat an entire command line. Don't forget also that you might use arrow keys and alt combinations to navigate within a single line.
It's one of the oldest tricks in the book--all the landline dialtone providers have been looking for some way to steer people away from thess less expensive VOIP alternatives, so they're highlighting all these horror stories just to scare people away.
Companies are required BY LAW to give severance pay and/or notice when laying off employees.
In the US this is not true, at least as a general statement. Under the doctrine of At-will employment you can be fired at any time for (almost) any reason.
I agree with your main point that SSN has become far more than just an identifier for the SSA, and that indeed this is a bad thing. However:
Now your SSN is your life for the most part.
Yes, this is true--though only to a certain extent--but your following argument is quite overstated:
If somsone has your number, they dont even need to know anything else to screw you over. With the number they can do searches and find your name and current residance. With that info they can sign up for credit cards in your name and screw over your credit.
If this were true, nobody would ever bother to steal a "list of SSNs" from a database! They would just randomly choose any 9-digit number. The security (or lack thereof) is in the linkage between the SSN and a person.
They can basicly steal your identity just by knowing that one special number.
Again, this an oversimplification. They still need to know whom that SSN represents. A reverse-lookup, if it existed, would imply that lists of SSNs wouldn't need to be stolen in the first place. Of course the kids in TFA most likely obtained more than just a list of raw 9-digit numbers; they probably also got the linkages between the SSNs and their owners.
I would suggest that the concept of capitalism doesn't extend very well, if at all, to any free-as-in-beer services (to include search engines, slashdot, and of course countless others). It is an indirect relationship at best, because users of the service actually don't pay for the price of ads (as they pay nothing at all to the provider).
The companies that sell things (for money) pay these service providers to have their message presented to potential customers of theirs. Note that it's not necessarily the fact that more potential customers means better; it's getting the ads out to the right potential customers that matters. Advertisers pay for the ads, then eventually some of the users pay the advertisers for their products/services. These are the markets in which capitalism lives.
In contrast, users of the free service are not customers at all; they're simply another commodity asset of the provider. The provider uses the demographics of its asset to help it sell advertising. This is a capitalist market for advertising, where service providers compete for advertising dollars by demonstrating that theirs is the best mix of users for their advertisers. Note also that these providers are advertisers themselves, including when they induce users to upgrade to "premium" services for a fee.
Indeed, because users are a valuable commodity in this respect, the service providers do compete to assemble what they perceive to be the optimum audience. However, I submit that there is no capitalism where there is no money changing hands. Users are a commodity asset "owned" by the free service provider. I would further suggest this helps explain the lack of "customer service" that many of these providers offer to users.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. You might want to see also "secundum quid" (or "Hasty Generalization") while you continue wishing; it is a logical fallacy. The form of "ad absurdum" is a parody of this technique, hence a troll (and I humbly suggest you also review what /. considers a troll before you get mod points).
Unfortunately, you don't get it but the GP does.
Brilliant! Another hasty generalization; another fallacy.
Agreed.
You may as well say the right to be a slave is a valuable part of our "spirit of freedom". Do you believe that someone should be allowed to contract being knocked senseless or infected with AIDS for some sort of renumeration?
WTF? Care to explain how exactly you managed to make this sick interpretation from my posting? Never mind; this must be a troll.
Right to contract is indeed valuable. As noted above (as if I somehow disputed it) rule of law trumps rule of contract. Your examples are against the law. I think I'm also obligated to say something crass like "Thanks for playing."
That's only a small part of it. The bigger problem is fragile (often patented) business models, which form the basis of many tech companies. It's usually not the technology itself they're protecting, it's more often the business models, strategic partners, marketing plans, etc.
The fact that the very foundation of a company can potentially walk out the door in the head of one human sure makes you think twice before investing in any such organization.
Just take one look at any Microsoft EULA, and consider how horrible and one-sided their non-disclosure and non-compete terms must be.
The right to contract is a valuable part of our "spirit of freedom" you mention.
One word: Publicity.
Ok, a few more words as well. I don't mean any negative connotation here in the sense of being self-serving, although that is certainly a distinct possibility. Still, if he thought it was an important enough flaw, maybe he's sacrificing himself for the greater good. It's difficult to know his true intentions at this stage, but certainly there are many valid reasons to ignore the will of those whom would censor you.
Speaking of which, TFA seems contradictory in this respect. First it says:
Since traditional artificial-light tubes and bulbs emit heat as well as visible light, the use of fiber-optic direct lighting will actually lessen the amount of energy that has to be expended on air conditioning, diminishing the strain on the grid.
Which clearly implies this technology is supposed to emit less heat than bulbs and tubes. But then, later it says:
Given that the visual light from even one fiber is capable of boiling water, there might be a fire hazard from broken fibers if the work is incorrectly or carelessly done, or if a later home renovator were to cut across the installed fibers.
So I thought, well, it might take some time to boil that water they mentioned, but it's a fire hazard as well? That doesn't sound like it's quite as cool as they were implying earlier (especially the title: "Cool Light on Hot Days").
While the pixels adjust their color, the backlight is off, and it will only switch on when the image is ready -- three times brighter than in a normal LCD TV to compensate for the dark period -- before going dark again.
Won't this make the flicker, oh, I don't know, about three times worse? I realize it's three times an LCD, not CRT, but still that seems like it could cause Pokemon-style seizures or something. Like you said, thanks, but no thanks.
You aren't kidding about slim--I've done a successful (text-based) install of Mandrake 9.2 on two Dell Latitude XPi laptops with only 40MB of RAM! This was even a network (NFS) install off of a PC Card NIC, because these ancient laptops don't even have built-in CD-ROMs.
With no moving parts, reliability is improved tremendously
Right, maybe you could argue that hard drives don't crash as often as the did in the past, so this is not an issue, but still I'd certainly pay a premium to have zero moving parts. Plus consider the power savings, and the resulting reduction in heat. Oh, and don't forget about the noise reduction as well.
I guess I just feel like everyone saying "it's not that much faster for the cost" is kind of missing a key point (perhaps *the* key point). It seems to me that any speed improvement is just a bonus; it's not like it's any slower than a traditional platter drive.
I don't mean to lash out at you in particular, but I can't believe what I'm reading in this thread. We cheer at Y2K and Daylight Saving Time mods, claiming "it keeps us in business" while meanwhile murdered spammers elicit barely any sympathy because of all the "harm" they have done. Don't any of you IT folks realize that if there weren't any "bad guys" that many of you wouldn't have jobs writing filters, updating virus definitions, and so forth?
Right, this is /. home of the insane moderators, so I feel I must explain that no, I am not trolling, and yes, I hate spam just as much as anybody else. I simply don't understand the hostility here, especially given the (apparently unacknowledged) co-dependencies involved.
Yes, and apparently they un-learned that it is "Daylight Saving Time" not "Daylight Savings Time" as well!
Well, the radio signal does not include DST information; that's a "client-side" feature of the clock itself. Most clocks allow you to configure which time zone offset you wish, as well as to specify whether you want the clock to observe DST during the appropriate time of the year.
And therein lies the problem!
I can't exactly "patch" my clocks/watches with an update to handle this absurdity. These aren't exactly field-upgradable. If this goes through, rather than being zero maintenance, each of these timepieces will need to be adjusted 4 times per year!
(Yes--four--go count if you don't believe me: once to compensate for DST starting before the device thinks it should; again to un-compensate upon the traditional DST start; once more to compensate upon the traditional DST end; and finally yet again to un-compensate for the real end of DST.)
So count me as one, I certainly care!
Yes, I know we are talking about a database of stolen SSNs, but read access is indeed a very large problem. Consider the fact that this can easily be used in reverse, as a tool to validate that an SSN is not stolen.
And remember, we're probably talking about every employer in the country having access to this wonderful SSN-validation tool. There's not a lot of hope that this system will not be abused.
DNS record lookup is a standard adhered to by 99.999% of the internet, and Sender-ID isn't
somhow implied this one:
I meant that Sender-ID records need some pretty advanced parsing, whereas A records don't
Look, I don't want to get into a verbal sparring match here, but there are a few points I think you're missing.
First, the A record is no more "DNS friendly" than the TXT record. Second, it's up to hotmail to implement the "advanced" parsing you mention; we just need to publish the TXT record if we want to send email to them. Third, even if you wanted to do so, using Sender-ID to filter inbound is a patented process licensed by MS; publishing the required records for outbound is completely unincumbered and fairly trivial to implement.
I want to be clear than I'm not supporting this MS-sponsored crap, but at least let's at least get the basic facts straight.
An unemployment claim that is fraudulently made on a stolen Social Security number would be easier to detect if there were a national database of stolen Social Security numbers.
Right... Hacker target number one. Ah, but maybe they've thought of this.
Again FTFA:
If and when a database is created, the only caveat is that it must possess airtight security features.
Right... See, humans will be involved somewhere, and humans can be corrupted just as easily as databases (and perhaps more so). The database will have a lookup function or it's worthless. So who will get access? Only state unemployment offices? How about credit card companies (think MasterCard)? And won't banks want a piece of this, too?
But wait, there's more. What about employers? They certainly wouldn't want to hire somebody who is using a known stolen SSN. Ok, so employers get access. It wouldn't be fair if it weren't every employer, from massive multinationals to the mom-and-pop store on the corner. Every one of these organizations will have the ability to lookup information from this database.
FTFA one last time:
At the current time, this initiative isn't even being discussed in the halls of Congress
Let's just hope it stays that way.
Umm, I really hate to break this to you, but if you RTFA you'll notice that Sender-ID is also based on DNS record lookups.
I think human nature is even worse than you imply. As the stakes go up, the greed hormone gets kicked into high gear. The more money they get, the greedier they get. It's a vicious (often self-destructive) cycle.
Are you trolling/joking, or did I miss something here? I'm against these idiotic patents as much as you, but certainly not for this particular reason. Some of these "hobbyists" are your best friends; they read slashdot, invent Linux, and do other wonderful things.
You're hopefully suggesting that folks who use baseless patents to turn their hobbies into business are evil, and there I would have to agree completely. Indeed there are abusers of the system, and they should be prosecuted. But I still have to disagree with your major premise. Not affording any type of protection to a hobbyist inventor may very well ensure that the next Big Thing will stay as a hobby, and never see the light of day.
As any small business owner will attest, it is incredibly difficult to obtain reasonable business insurance, especially professional liability, and even more so when they don't understand the technology behind your business itself. The reason is that the insurance industry is running scared about terrorism, the great "unknown" world of IT, and our generally vindictive litigious society.
None of these factors are in their actuarial tables, so they presume you're going to cost them millions of dollars. They don't care whether they understand or not; they're simply not willing to take the risk.
Now, how do you suppose the insurance company will treat your small business, if it happens to accept credit cards for payment? Not good.
Do you suppose they'll care how paranoid you are about data security? Will they care how many levels of protection you afford the data of your customers?
The answer is a resounding "no" to all. They don't have the technical acumen to judge what is and what is not appropriate (honestly, too few people who call themselves "security experts" do). And they don't care. They simply raise the rates to astronomical levels, with a big "screw you" attitude, because they're somewhat ironically not at all in the business of taking risks.
I'm curious though how skewed this figure is, due to the fact that you probably use special keys (tab, escape, up arrow) to auto-complete file/directory names or repeat an entire command line. Don't forget also that you might use arrow keys and alt combinations to navigate within a single line.
There were only 3 bugs fixed in 8.0.1, not 44! See the Release Notes for yourself.
It's one of the oldest tricks in the book--all the landline dialtone providers have been looking for some way to steer people away from thess less expensive VOIP alternatives, so they're highlighting all these horror stories just to scare people away.
In the US this is not true, at least as a general statement. Under the doctrine of At-will employment you can be fired at any time for (almost) any reason.
Now your SSN is your life for the most part.
Yes, this is true--though only to a certain extent--but your following argument is quite overstated:
If somsone has your number, they dont even need to know anything else to screw you over. With the number they can do searches and find your name and current residance. With that info they can sign up for credit cards in your name and screw over your credit.
If this were true, nobody would ever bother to steal a "list of SSNs" from a database! They would just randomly choose any 9-digit number. The security (or lack thereof) is in the linkage between the SSN and a person.
They can basicly steal your identity just by knowing that one special number.
Again, this an oversimplification. They still need to know whom that SSN represents. A reverse-lookup, if it existed, would imply that lists of SSNs wouldn't need to be stolen in the first place. Of course the kids in TFA most likely obtained more than just a list of raw 9-digit numbers; they probably also got the linkages between the SSNs and their owners.
The companies that sell things (for money) pay these service providers to have their message presented to potential customers of theirs. Note that it's not necessarily the fact that more potential customers means better; it's getting the ads out to the right potential customers that matters. Advertisers pay for the ads, then eventually some of the users pay the advertisers for their products/services. These are the markets in which capitalism lives.
In contrast, users of the free service are not customers at all; they're simply another commodity asset of the provider. The provider uses the demographics of its asset to help it sell advertising. This is a capitalist market for advertising, where service providers compete for advertising dollars by demonstrating that theirs is the best mix of users for their advertisers. Note also that these providers are advertisers themselves, including when they induce users to upgrade to "premium" services for a fee.
Indeed, because users are a valuable commodity in this respect, the service providers do compete to assemble what they perceive to be the optimum audience. However, I submit that there is no capitalism where there is no money changing hands. Users are a commodity asset "owned" by the free service provider. I would further suggest this helps explain the lack of "customer service" that many of these providers offer to users.