Sorry, but the Heartland Institute has the is an dedicated to unregulated, free markets. They are a policy organization masquerading as a research group, one which has been accused of being funded heavily by Exxon. Now I usually view GreenPeace's "facts" with quite a bit of skepticism, but I do the same with anything coming out of the Heartland Institute. Both organizations are so hell bent on political influence, that they can't maintain the objective view needed to supply useful facts. At some point science-with-a-political-slant becomes political-rhetoric-with-a-scientific-slant. Both of these organizations are well over that line.
I find that the contrast ratio of pure white on pure black is still too high, I favor white on grey rather like the way slashdot's "Reply to This" button looks.
However having seen a friend's Kindle which uses reflected light, I find that the tradition black text on white background to be the most comfortable. I look forward to the day when there are full color, 60 FPS, reflected light monitors.
Basic health care, environmental protection, police, fire protection and many other generic systems Is paid for by the property taxes where the various pieces of equipment are located.
Education of the people working at the company Is paid for as and end unto it self, it is a governemtn investment that pays big returns already. educated countries have massively higher GNPs than uneducated countries.
The juridical and monetary systems that make doing any business possible I already pay for that via State and federal income taxes, I don't need to pay for it again. Besides which the monetary system I use for all my online interactions is called American Express, I have never once used the money printed by the Federal Reserve to pay for anything online.
Scientific research which forms the base of any modern technology; That research is already a publicly owned good, because we all paid for it the first time by funding DARPA.
It's ridiculous to exempt an entire economic sector from taxes. It is stealing from people in other businesses. no no no. It is ridiculous to tax people multiple times on the same dollar. Since we already pay income tax on every dollar we use to buy these goods and services, this is simply a case of the government stealing unevenly from different businesses. If you have to pay income tax at 30% and you buy a product with a 5% sales tax, made here in the US where half it's production cost is labor, then it's already been marked up an extra 15% to cover the income tax for the larborer and another 5% for materials sales tax and another few percent for the property taxes of the manufacturer's facility. Well we are already looking at having every dollar earned only getting us $0.50 worth of goods with the extra going to our government. Who exactly is doing the stealing here?
I understand it's actually against the law (sorry, no citation) to refuse to accept cash for the full amount...But still, if you owe $10, then the debtor must accept a $10 bill as payment in full.
I City of New York Parks Department will not accept cash for it's membership fees. I've tried to pay in cash, and was refused.
I think the problem with bloggers is that so many of them are making solo efforts.
I think the problem is:"The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue...in the last three years...turned his home into an office for him and four employees." Millions of dollars in three years and he's only got four employees and is working out of his home? Get an office and hire some more people you penny pinching fool! Or cash out, put the money in high interest savings, and work part time to supplement the $80k+ a year that $2 million will earn in interest. Look at the decades it takes to gross a few million as a plumber or mechanic or teacher or police officer and then tell me how hard it is to write a blog. Sure it might be more intense it the short term to maintain a highly successful blog, but it it allows you to retire in five years instead of a career of forty years, your sum total of stress and difficulty is going to be far far less in the end.
It is MUCH harder to tamper with paper ballots. You might be able to do a few areas, but to do it all while the other parties have people watching is hard.
With most electronic voting systems, 3rd parties can't watch the "counting" easily.
heck, I can't watch the "counting" easily for my own vote while I'm there in the voting booth. Most voting machines, including the manual pull-the-lever type, lack the most basic check: Verification by the voter doing the voting. The infamous "hanging chads" were a good example of this, the voter had no way to see if their vote was recorded correctly. This can only really be done with a piece of paper, written in English, that is inspected by the voter. With the pull-the-lever machines we have in NY, something as simple as a misplaced label would record every vote for a particular candidate incorrectly. With the touch-screen type, you push a button, see a "thank you for voting" screen and hope for the best. Niether the current system or any of teh proposed systems have any way for me to see the hard copy recording of my vote, so that I can see that it was correctly recorded. Touch screens could be handy for preliminary counts, but the real count should be of the receipts that the touch screens would print out, that the voter could check, and that could be easily verifiable by anyone of the voting public.
I thought he was saying that Linux games suck. There is a Linux port of EVE, but other than that they pretty much do suck. Yes I know he could run them in WINE, but if his focus is PC games why wouldn't he just stick with the OS that gets the first release of all the new games?
I think that Apple would fight harder than NYC for the rights to the logo, unless Bloomberg decides to make it his current crusade. (which he won't until he get congestion pricing passed) NYC would just use the Statue of Liberty or something as an alternate logo, but Apple computers would have no other option than to fight tooth and nail for the apple logo. I too would like to see this get huge and ugly as a mean of forcing a hard look at IP law I just think that Apple would fight harder for it.
tell me how people can afford to buy stuff if they have no job, or one that pays 1/2 as much?
They can't. In the words of Marriner Eccles:
As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery....But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.
Of course it is, but these academics will go ahead and develope this tech and then be all suprised five to ten years down the road when Real ID cards with complete live tracking become a required "National Security" measure. I'm far less concerned with the idea of some random psycho using this to track me as I am with the government and other dataminers (marketing, transit, credit agencies, insurance) tracking me. "if you're thinking about making this mandatory under the guise of security or comfort, you're going to be tracking my RFID tag in a garbage can." Unfortunately when this tech becomes about "National Security" you won't have much choice, unless you are prepared to be denied access to most public buildings and transit for failure to carry proper ID. Or possibly you'll just get arrested. All that's really required is that a failure to produce a RealID RFID response becomes reasonable suspicion.
I can't believe they forgot to mention his favorite spell: "Fear and Confuse"- This spell has a nation wide area of effect causing any creatures with below 14 INT to see enemies in every shadow and to believe that the caster is their best hope of salvation. Any mage attempting to cast a "Dispel Fear" will immediately be lynched by the effected creatures. Duration: each effected creatures rolls 2d4 for number of years under the spell.
Or pocket the money and not lay any new cables anyway, which is the most likely thing to happen.
That might not hold true if they can only charge for the number of gigs that they have actually supplied and there was demand that couldn't be met because of insufficient infrastructure. The problem under the current system is that the ISPs aren't losing potential sales because of thier failure to keep pace with demand. They get the same flat rate regardless of what they supply, tie the money directly to the amount of content delivered and the ISPs will do everything they can to get as many gigs to click through your internet meter as possible. P2P and YouTube will be their new cash cows.
Universities are a service industry not a product industry. Maybe most students get duped into thinking that they are product, but if I'm paying $30k+ a year you bet your ass that I'm gonna get the service I pay for. Research grants only show up if you have students to provide free labor, it's much easier for students to transfer schools than for professors or campus presidents to find new jobs. There is no one with a more flexible mobile life than an average student: no mortgage, no spouse, no years invested in a company, not even furniture worth worrying about, already moves twice a year. mobility + control of the revenue stream = you the boss. The same understanding holds true later on in the work force: if you are truly good at what you do a small to medium sized business needs your labor more than you need their job. Yes I have used this in my own career, and yes I am treated with courtesy and respect by my bosses and I am paid well. Act like a serf and you will be treated like a serf, act like a valuable asset and you will be treated like a valuable asset. Don't be a diva, just don't bow and scrape to the bossman or the Dean. Mutual respect makes for a very pleasant environment for work or school, but that is rarely present if you allow yourself to be seen as a "product" or "interchangeable cog".
the university should be protecting these students by threatening to end the contract.
Why do university students always forget that the professors are their employees? "The university" doesn't have to do jack, the students need to all drop all of that professors classes. It works, at my alma mater I saw a professor let go when his classes dropped to zero enrollment because he had sufficiently pissed off his students. I'm all for professors making a nice buck on the side, publishing or consulting or researching, right up until it starts to effect the quality of work that makes them professors; teaching the students.
Why on Earth wouldn't BT just do this on their side of the connection? EVERYTHING that the user gets goes through their pipes, their routers.
That's really just a matter of semantics, either way it's still spying. Contrary to what is frequently espoused here on slashdot, there should still be an expectation of privacy even though the internet is largely public. If I yell my ATM pin number in the bank, then everyone knows it through no shady effort on their part, but if someone carefully looks over my shoulder to learn my pin number that is a very different matter. When two people are having a quiet conversation in a park it is rude to listen in, but if they are having a shouting match in the same park, then there is no fault in hearing it. Most of the time when someone is surfing the net, they are doing so with the expectation that they are only communicating with one other entity, the site that they are visiting. Regardless of any claims in the EULA from the ISP, that is the common expectation. Privacy is part of what is expected in return for paying for use of an ISPs infrastructure, so the fact that the ISPs own the routers and fiber that the information passes through does not give the ISPs rights to that information. Some may say that in this case the common expectation is wrong, but remember that common values and expectations are the foundation for any system of law.
And think of all the great literary works that were written on paper, they are still readable today.
Really? Let's see just how readable the english language is a few versions back: Middle English or how about Old English Those texts aren't readable. But we still know what they say because they have been translated into the modern English, just like someone needs to translate some PowerPoint presentations from several versions ago into the modern usage.
Face it, formats and applications evolve over time and expecting every evolution to be backwards compatible for more than one generation is foolish, of course having a new generation of OS every three years might also be a foolish. But if the new generations of OS are in fact justified, then by those very same reasons so are the OS bound evolutions of applications.
If your defensive plan doesn't include any offensive measures, you're doing it wrong.
Let's put that idea into a different context. As the state and local police forces around our country take continue to take a more offensive stance do you feel safer? How about the way music labels protect their interests, is that better when it is offensive? I don't think so. I think that the only time an offensive posture look like a good defense is when you are on the side being more aggressive. To everyone not being directly served by the increased aggressiveness it just looks like abuse of power.
Gearing up for offensive strikes breeds the "need" for offensive strikes. It's human nature, people go with what they know and train for as the answer. A surgeon will try to fix things with surgery first while a pharmacist will try to fix the same problem with medications. Or in a more slashdot-esque analogy: a programmer will see the solution to a task through the filter of the programming languages they know the best, and have focused on most recently. When you have big organizations spending a lot of time and money training to attack, they will find reasons and targets to use that training on.
Have you tried loading old win95 powerpoint slides in a new version of ppt?
Have you tried putting leaded fuel in your new car? Of course not, leaded fuel is only for antique cars. Guess what, win95 anything is only for antique computers. Dust off your old Pentium II if you want to run stuff from win95. Or maybe make a new presentation, I'm sure your old one looks like it's from 13 years ago.
The attacks you are talking about are just the tip of the iceberg. It would be possible to perform such fraud on a nation-wide basis. Against just about any person in the nation.And our system is NOT equipped to deal with such.
This kind of database problem was pointed out back in 1967 in a fascinating article in Atlantic magazine.
A committee of the Bureau of the Budget has proposed that the federal government set up a National Data Center to compile statistical information on various facets of our society. Certainly the computer can help us simplify record-keeping by assigning everyone a "birth" number that will identify him for tax returns, banking, education, social security, the draft, and other purposes....But such a Data Center poses a grave threat to individual freedom and privacy. With its insatiable appetite for information, its inability to forget anything that has been put into it, a central computer might become the heart of a government surveillance system that would lay bare our finances, our associations, or our mental and physical health to government inquisitors or even to casual observers. Computer technology is moving so rapidly that a sharp line between statistical and intelligence systems is bound to be obliterated....As information accumulates, the contents of an individual's computerized dossier will appear more and more impressive and will impart a heightened sense of reliability to the user, which, coupled with the myth of computer infallibility, will make it less likely that the user will try to verify the recorded data. This will be true despite the "softness" or "imprecision" of much of the data. Our success or failure in life ultimately may turn on what other people decide to put into our files and on the programmer's ability, or inability, to evaluate, process, and interrelate information....Eventually, these bureaus will make a network of their computers, creating a ready source of detailed information about an individual's finances. The accuracy of these records will become increasingly crucial; an honest dispute between a consumer and a retailer over a bill may produce an unexplained and unexpungeable "no pay" evaluation in the computer and result in considerable damage to the buyer's credit rating. link worth reading
Cyber Warfare Command would imply that any aggressive actions were part of a declared war. That would be fine, but would likely be viewed as too restrictive by many politicians and military brass. I can't imagine that Lieutenant General Robert J Elder, Jr would be content to only take aggressive actions against countries which were in a congressionally declared state of war. I don't think cyberwarfare is a big issue coming out of Iraq or Afghanistan, and I don't think Congress is going to declare war on North Korea, China, or Russia any time soon.
An attack mentality from an organization called Cyber Defense Command can only mean bad things are about to happen
The organization is call Cyber Defense Command for a reason, because they know that they should be "defending". If they were honest in their naming then perhaps it would be call Cyber Attack Command. Hmmm, I wonder what other countries would think of that.... It's probably the same reason that our Department of Defense isn't call the Department of Preemptive Strikes. It was called The Department of War until 1947. I know some here will say "the best defense is a good offense", but when you have organizations with "an attack mentality" they will always find someone and some reason to attack. War without End.
Democrats and Republicans are dominating Congress?!! Run for the hills!
I got the joke, but the two party system is one of the major weaknesses of our government. It provides a barrier to entry for anyone not wanting a lifetime career in politics, because of the need to cull party favor for several years before having a chance of appearing on any ballot. Political parties at the organizational level are corporations that have direct influence over a huge percentage of our government. Congressmen should not be beholden to a group other than their constituents. Just look a how influential superdelegates are turning out to be in the presidential nominations, this hand full of people who are superdelegates hold as much or more influence over the candidates choices as do the people. They are the aristocracy, we are the commoners, this is not how it was meant to be.
Band-Aids, Toyota, Whole Foods, Glock, Clorox, Dyson, BMW, Jones Soda
Could it be that those products are winning because they have consistently high quality? Sure I suppose that some of that could fall under the heading of marketing, if marketing means knowing that people don't like shoddy design, planned obsolescence, or unnatural food additives. I suppose that making a connection between poor business practices that result in a boycott or lack of trust in your product would have to qualify as marketing too. I'm fine with businesses knowing that those things are important, but then marketing should also understand that I find databasing my non-consumer habits to be an offensive business practice, and apparently so do many other people.
Just make a product to that the CEO would actually want to use on a regular basis and the company will have a good reputation.I believe all Apple design is centered on pleasing Steve Jobs, Apple has a good reputation for quality. I'm guessing that the upper management of McDonalds doesn't eat there regularly and the Waltons don't shop at Wal-mart, those companies have bad reputations for quality. No need to snoop my search data to have a good reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but the Heartland Institute has the is an dedicated to unregulated, free markets. They are a policy organization masquerading as a research group, one which has been accused of being funded heavily by Exxon. Now I usually view GreenPeace's "facts" with quite a bit of skepticism, but I do the same with anything coming out of the Heartland Institute. Both organizations are so hell bent on political influence, that they can't maintain the objective view needed to supply useful facts. At some point science-with-a-political-slant becomes political-rhetoric-with-a-scientific-slant. Both of these organizations are well over that line.
I find that the contrast ratio of pure white on pure black is still too high, I favor white on grey rather like the way slashdot's "Reply to This" button looks. However having seen a friend's Kindle which uses reflected light, I find that the tradition black text on white background to be the most comfortable. I look forward to the day when there are full color, 60 FPS, reflected light monitors.
Basic health care, environmental protection, police, fire protection and many other generic systems
Is paid for by the property taxes where the various pieces of equipment are located.
Education of the people working at the company
Is paid for as and end unto it self, it is a governemtn investment that pays big returns already. educated countries have massively higher GNPs than uneducated countries.
The juridical and monetary systems that make doing any business possible
I already pay for that via State and federal income taxes, I don't need to pay for it again. Besides which the monetary system I use for all my online interactions is called American Express, I have never once used the money printed by the Federal Reserve to pay for anything online.
Scientific research which forms the base of any modern technology;
That research is already a publicly owned good, because we all paid for it the first time by funding DARPA.
It's ridiculous to exempt an entire economic sector from taxes. It is stealing from people in other businesses.
no no no. It is ridiculous to tax people multiple times on the same dollar. Since we already pay income tax on every dollar we use to buy these goods and services, this is simply a case of the government stealing unevenly from different businesses. If you have to pay income tax at 30% and you buy a product with a 5% sales tax, made here in the US where half it's production cost is labor, then it's already been marked up an extra 15% to cover the income tax for the larborer and another 5% for materials sales tax and another few percent for the property taxes of the manufacturer's facility. Well we are already looking at having every dollar earned only getting us $0.50 worth of goods with the extra going to our government. Who exactly is doing the stealing here?
I understand it's actually against the law (sorry, no citation) to refuse to accept cash for the full amount...But still, if you owe $10, then the debtor must accept a $10 bill as payment in full.
I City of New York Parks Department will not accept cash for it's membership fees. I've tried to pay in cash, and was refused.
It seems to me that it would be impossible to extrapolate this VR study to real life.
I have to wonder how they accounted for the Uncanny Valley.
I think the problem with bloggers is that so many of them are making solo efforts.
I think the problem is:"The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue...in the last three years...turned his home into an office for him and four employees." Millions of dollars in three years and he's only got four employees and is working out of his home? Get an office and hire some more people you penny pinching fool! Or cash out, put the money in high interest savings, and work part time to supplement the $80k+ a year that $2 million will earn in interest. Look at the decades it takes to gross a few million as a plumber or mechanic or teacher or police officer and then tell me how hard it is to write a blog. Sure it might be more intense it the short term to maintain a highly successful blog, but it it allows you to retire in five years instead of a career of forty years, your sum total of stress and difficulty is going to be far far less in the end.
It is MUCH harder to tamper with paper ballots. You might be able to do a few areas, but to do it all while the other parties have people watching is hard. With most electronic voting systems, 3rd parties can't watch the "counting" easily.
heck, I can't watch the "counting" easily for my own vote while I'm there in the voting booth. Most voting machines, including the manual pull-the-lever type, lack the most basic check: Verification by the voter doing the voting. The infamous "hanging chads" were a good example of this, the voter had no way to see if their vote was recorded correctly. This can only really be done with a piece of paper, written in English, that is inspected by the voter. With the pull-the-lever machines we have in NY, something as simple as a misplaced label would record every vote for a particular candidate incorrectly. With the touch-screen type, you push a button, see a "thank you for voting" screen and hope for the best. Niether the current system or any of teh proposed systems have any way for me to see the hard copy recording of my vote, so that I can see that it was correctly recorded. Touch screens could be handy for preliminary counts, but the real count should be of the receipts that the touch screens would print out, that the voter could check, and that could be easily verifiable by anyone of the voting public.
I thought he was saying that Linux games suck. There is a Linux port of EVE, but other than that they pretty much do suck. Yes I know he could run them in WINE, but if his focus is PC games why wouldn't he just stick with the OS that gets the first release of all the new games?
I think that Apple would fight harder than NYC for the rights to the logo, unless Bloomberg decides to make it his current crusade. (which he won't until he get congestion pricing passed) NYC would just use the Statue of Liberty or something as an alternate logo, but Apple computers would have no other option than to fight tooth and nail for the apple logo. I too would like to see this get huge and ugly as a mean of forcing a hard look at IP law I just think that Apple would fight harder for it.
They can't. In the words of Marriner Eccles: Guess where we are right now?
this technology as being inherently double edged.
Of course it is, but these academics will go ahead and develope this tech and then be all suprised five to ten years down the road when Real ID cards with complete live tracking become a required "National Security" measure. I'm far less concerned with the idea of some random psycho using this to track me as I am with the government and other dataminers (marketing, transit, credit agencies, insurance) tracking me. "if you're thinking about making this mandatory under the guise of security or comfort, you're going to be tracking my RFID tag in a garbage can." Unfortunately when this tech becomes about "National Security" you won't have much choice, unless you are prepared to be denied access to most public buildings and transit for failure to carry proper ID. Or possibly you'll just get arrested. All that's really required is that a failure to produce a RealID RFID response becomes reasonable suspicion.
I can't believe they forgot to mention his favorite spell:
"Fear and Confuse"- This spell has a nation wide area of effect causing any creatures with below 14 INT to see enemies in every shadow and to believe that the caster is their best hope of salvation. Any mage attempting to cast a "Dispel Fear" will immediately be lynched by the effected creatures. Duration: each effected creatures rolls 2d4 for number of years under the spell.
Or pocket the money and not lay any new cables anyway, which is the most likely thing to happen.
That might not hold true if they can only charge for the number of gigs that they have actually supplied and there was demand that couldn't be met because of insufficient infrastructure. The problem under the current system is that the ISPs aren't losing potential sales because of thier failure to keep pace with demand. They get the same flat rate regardless of what they supply, tie the money directly to the amount of content delivered and the ISPs will do everything they can to get as many gigs to click through your internet meter as possible. P2P and YouTube will be their new cash cows.
Universities are a service industry not a product industry. Maybe most students get duped into thinking that they are product, but if I'm paying $30k+ a year you bet your ass that I'm gonna get the service I pay for. Research grants only show up if you have students to provide free labor, it's much easier for students to transfer schools than for professors or campus presidents to find new jobs. There is no one with a more flexible mobile life than an average student: no mortgage, no spouse, no years invested in a company, not even furniture worth worrying about, already moves twice a year. mobility + control of the revenue stream = you the boss. The same understanding holds true later on in the work force: if you are truly good at what you do a small to medium sized business needs your labor more than you need their job. Yes I have used this in my own career, and yes I am treated with courtesy and respect by my bosses and I am paid well. Act like a serf and you will be treated like a serf, act like a valuable asset and you will be treated like a valuable asset. Don't be a diva, just don't bow and scrape to the bossman or the Dean. Mutual respect makes for a very pleasant environment for work or school, but that is rarely present if you allow yourself to be seen as a "product" or "interchangeable cog".
the university should be protecting these students by threatening to end the contract.
Why do university students always forget that the professors are their employees? "The university" doesn't have to do jack, the students need to all drop all of that professors classes. It works, at my alma mater I saw a professor let go when his classes dropped to zero enrollment because he had sufficiently pissed off his students. I'm all for professors making a nice buck on the side, publishing or consulting or researching, right up until it starts to effect the quality of work that makes them professors; teaching the students.
Why on Earth wouldn't BT just do this on their side of the connection? EVERYTHING that the user gets goes through their pipes, their routers.
That's really just a matter of semantics, either way it's still spying. Contrary to what is frequently espoused here on slashdot, there should still be an expectation of privacy even though the internet is largely public. If I yell my ATM pin number in the bank, then everyone knows it through no shady effort on their part, but if someone carefully looks over my shoulder to learn my pin number that is a very different matter. When two people are having a quiet conversation in a park it is rude to listen in, but if they are having a shouting match in the same park, then there is no fault in hearing it. Most of the time when someone is surfing the net, they are doing so with the expectation that they are only communicating with one other entity, the site that they are visiting. Regardless of any claims in the EULA from the ISP, that is the common expectation. Privacy is part of what is expected in return for paying for use of an ISPs infrastructure, so the fact that the ISPs own the routers and fiber that the information passes through does not give the ISPs rights to that information. Some may say that in this case the common expectation is wrong, but remember that common values and expectations are the foundation for any system of law.
How the fuck did an iPhone knockoff snag the number one spot?
Because it's not tied to AT&T, than in itself is a sufficient distinction to make it potentially far superior.
And think of all the great literary works that were written on paper, they are still readable today.
Really? Let's see just how readable the english language is a few versions back: Middle English or how about Old English Those texts aren't readable. But we still know what they say because they have been translated into the modern English, just like someone needs to translate some PowerPoint presentations from several versions ago into the modern usage.
Face it, formats and applications evolve over time and expecting every evolution to be backwards compatible for more than one generation is foolish, of course having a new generation of OS every three years might also be a foolish. But if the new generations of OS are in fact justified, then by those very same reasons so are the OS bound evolutions of applications.
If your defensive plan doesn't include any offensive measures, you're doing it wrong.
Let's put that idea into a different context. As the state and local police forces around our country take continue to take a more offensive stance do you feel safer? How about the way music labels protect their interests, is that better when it is offensive? I don't think so. I think that the only time an offensive posture look like a good defense is when you are on the side being more aggressive. To everyone not being directly served by the increased aggressiveness it just looks like abuse of power.
Gearing up for offensive strikes breeds the "need" for offensive strikes. It's human nature, people go with what they know and train for as the answer. A surgeon will try to fix things with surgery first while a pharmacist will try to fix the same problem with medications. Or in a more slashdot-esque analogy: a programmer will see the solution to a task through the filter of the programming languages they know the best, and have focused on most recently. When you have big organizations spending a lot of time and money training to attack, they will find reasons and targets to use that training on.
Have you tried loading old win95 powerpoint slides in a new version of ppt?
Have you tried putting leaded fuel in your new car? Of course not, leaded fuel is only for antique cars. Guess what, win95 anything is only for antique computers. Dust off your old Pentium II if you want to run stuff from win95. Or maybe make a new presentation, I'm sure your old one looks like it's from 13 years ago.
This kind of database problem was pointed out back in 1967 in a fascinating article in Atlantic magazine.
Cyber Warfare Command would imply that any aggressive actions were part of a declared war. That would be fine, but would likely be viewed as too restrictive by many politicians and military brass. I can't imagine that Lieutenant General Robert J Elder, Jr would be content to only take aggressive actions against countries which were in a congressionally declared state of war. I don't think cyberwarfare is a big issue coming out of Iraq or Afghanistan, and I don't think Congress is going to declare war on North Korea, China, or Russia any time soon.
An attack mentality from an organization called Cyber Defense Command can only mean bad things are about to happen
The organization is call Cyber Defense Command for a reason, because they know that they should be "defending". If they were honest in their naming then perhaps it would be call Cyber Attack Command. Hmmm, I wonder what other countries would think of that.... It's probably the same reason that our Department of Defense isn't call the Department of Preemptive Strikes. It was called The Department of War until 1947. I know some here will say "the best defense is a good offense", but when you have organizations with "an attack mentality" they will always find someone and some reason to attack. War without End.
Democrats and Republicans are dominating Congress?!! Run for the hills!
I got the joke, but the two party system is one of the major weaknesses of our government. It provides a barrier to entry for anyone not wanting a lifetime career in politics, because of the need to cull party favor for several years before having a chance of appearing on any ballot. Political parties at the organizational level are corporations that have direct influence over a huge percentage of our government. Congressmen should not be beholden to a group other than their constituents. Just look a how influential superdelegates are turning out to be in the presidential nominations, this hand full of people who are superdelegates hold as much or more influence over the candidates choices as do the people. They are the aristocracy, we are the commoners, this is not how it was meant to be.
Band-Aids, Toyota, Whole Foods, Glock, Clorox, Dyson, BMW, Jones Soda
Could it be that those products are winning because they have consistently high quality?
Sure I suppose that some of that could fall under the heading of marketing, if marketing means knowing that people don't like shoddy design, planned obsolescence, or unnatural food additives. I suppose that making a connection between poor business practices that result in a boycott or lack of trust in your product would have to qualify as marketing too. I'm fine with businesses knowing that those things are important, but then marketing should also understand that I find databasing my non-consumer habits to be an offensive business practice, and apparently so do many other people.
Just make a product to that the CEO would actually want to use on a regular basis and the company will have a good reputation.I believe all Apple design is centered on pleasing Steve Jobs, Apple has a good reputation for quality. I'm guessing that the upper management of McDonalds doesn't eat there regularly and the Waltons don't shop at Wal-mart, those companies have bad reputations for quality. No need to snoop my search data to have a good reputation.