Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.
This is a meaningless statistic without more information. We don't know how many drives this is (for all we know, you could have bought a drive ten years ago, it failed after two days, and then you bought another drive that's still going strong).
Also, what does "50% failure rate" mean to you? That 50% of the drives you've purchased within the last ten years have, so far, failed? After how long? The following pattern would be a "50% failure rate" but would also be considered totally acceptable by, you know, normal people:
Year 1: Buy a 10 GB drive (drive A). Year 2: Buy a 20 GB drive (drive B). Later in year 2: Drive A fails. Year 4: Buy a 40 GB drive (drive C). Year 6: Buy an 80 GB drive (drive D). Year 8: Drive B fails. End of year 10: Drives C and D are still going strong. Drive A only lasted 1.5 years but drive B lasted 6 years. You bought four drives and two eventually failed. That's a "50% failure rate" but I don't really see how it's a problem.
Maybe "failure rate" means "immediately"? Like, of all the drives you bought in the last ten years, half of them failed out of the box? Gosh, maybe that info would have been useful in your post?:)
The trickiest thing about security is that there's no reliable way to tell for sure whether it's worked or not. Any security system can be defeated by a properly designed attack, although for a given system this may never happen if there's no one who has both the resources and desire to defeat it.
But the trick is, a sufficiently well-planned attack can defeat security without anyone knowing it happened. So you can't really rely on a count like the number of detected intrusions (whether they were thwarted or not). The result of this fact is that there's a huge amount of crosstalk about "best practices" and what's Good Security and what's not. You could have a system that tracks N intrusions per year, and thwarts them all, but if there were 2N intrusions that were not detected (let alone thwarted)... you go around claiming you've got great security, but do you really?
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have security, obviously, but it does mean that security is a giant, tricky grey area.
Considering the fact that the majority of jurors are people not smart enough to get out of jury duty
The jury system is an incredibly important part of our freedom and it doesn't do us any good for you to act like it's beneath you to serve on a jury.
I used to feel the same way, until I got called to jury duty (bitching and moaning)... and then I served on a jury. And it was a fantastic experience. Yes, boring at times, but I had books to read when the judge and counsel were having private sidebars.
Back when you spent a week at the courthouse whether they needed you or not, yeah, I can understand it being annoying. These days you're more likely than not to spend only a day, and sometimes not even that, since you can call in by phone and find out whether they even need you to come down.
Her concern is extremely mature; specifically it's related to Group B streptococcus infections, which are the "leading cause of death" among neonates. However, the actual incidence of death is very low (1 per 10,000 live births), and yet because it's been touted as the "leading cause of death" in the obstetrics domain for several years, obstetrics practices are really uptight about it -- more so than is really necessary. This is the kind of thing she's talking about:)
Anyway, just because there are worse problems in the world doesn't mean we can't tackle more than one of them at a time. Murder is no doubt a worse problem than vandalism, but we also devote resources to preventing vandalism and prosecuting vandals.
My wife pointed out that the phrase "the leading cause of death" is one we need to be careful of, because it only tells you what caused the *most* deaths, not whether something causes an unacceptably large amount of deaths. (Yes, yes, what's an "acceptable death," bite me.) It came up in the context of neonatal deaths; she pointed out that one day, all causes of neonatal death will have been wiped out, and then one newborn will get eaten by a dingo and suddenly dingoes will be the "leading cause of death among newborns," and we'll have an uproar about dingo eradication...
Yes, he's a troll, but here's an important thing for everyone to remember: the phrase "activist judge" is a synonym for "a judge who made a ruling I don't like."
1) Restricting freedom seems to be OK in the advancement of The Cause. For example, allowing invariant sections via the FDL in order to force people to republish the GNU Manifesto.
The GPL is about restricting the freedom of developers so as to provide more freedom for users. The BSD license is the other way around. But there are a lot more users than developers.
Besides, there are plenty of other cases of "restricting freedom" in order to advance another goal -- for example, your freedom to inflict bodily harm on people is greatly restricted, so as to advance the goal of a peaceful society.
2) Wielding a club without first taking a look to see whether it is necessary or beneficial: Tivoization clauses, for example. I think this actually a bad thing in terms of giving people more incentive to rethink effective DRM schemes, and the like. Furthermore, I believe that competition will always promote freedom in the end.
Unrestrained competition does not generally promote freedom; it generally promotes feudalism. No, I'm not joking. Half the point of government intervention in markets is to deal with market failures: situations where an unrestricted market does NOT generate an optimal result. Health care, transportation, and utilities are all examples where unregulated systems invariably lead to abusive oligarchies. (This is not to say that regulation is perfect, obviously, but we could spend lifetimes arguing economics.;))
However that's not especially relevant to the GPL; nobody is forcing the GPL on anyone, they're merely providing it as the license they encourage people to use.
I'm not familiar with the AGPL at all so I can't comment on point 3.
I think the FSF would contend that how "other people benefit from the code" is affected by more than just how other people can directly use/compile/modify the code. To them, being able to close source code hurts things overall more than allowing someone to close the source helps things. Whether this is true is of course arguable.
The FSF's "philosophical" position is one intended to achieve a practical result -- better software, a better society. Besides, the idea that the GPL can make things better is a falsifiable claim, whereas religious dogma is not:)
...that "so many nerds" are libertarians, it's probably because nerds don't do well with the kind of chaotic, unpredictable systems you find in politics, and so they insist we have as little politics as possible.:)
Of course, there are plenty of highly political nerds with social views besides libertarianism, so don't reply with that "But I'm a socialist/conservative nerd!" piffle. We're talking about a (claimed) statistical trend, here.
This is a good general method, but there are some problems in certain environments. My company, for example, runs a massive load-balanced server farm; we can't really use PHP sessions because two successive requests from the same user may go to separate servers.
Locking to IP address is a non-starter because there are ISPs who will rotate their visible IP range dynamically, so that user A might appear to be coming from IP X on one request, and from IP Y on the subsequent request. Then that's user's screwed.
Right, so because you have only had to replace one battery in the last five years, therefore Apple made the right call in having a non-user-replaceable battery? The plural of "anecdote" is not "data," dude.
I think the logic is that the government has managed to fail keeping things secret many times, including things that were considered just as important. (Past a certain point, things can't really get any more urgent or important, anyway.) Therefore the odds of something like this actually having happened as is suspected, and successfully being kept secret for sixty years, are tiny.
To rephrase: The government has never been good at keeping huge secrets secret, therefore it's more likely that there was no alien crash than that there was one and the government has successfully hidden all evidence for sixty years.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but I think that's the argument they're making.
The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote.
Let me brainstorm for a minute. Don't take any of this as gospel, I'm neither an evolutionary biologist nor especially knowledgable about life on other planets;)
Not necessarily. There's only so many variations on relative sensory organ placement, and many of them will not work as well in a variety of environments as ours does. If your eyes are below your nose, for example, then your breathing passage has to go down past the eyes, while your optic nerve has to wend around the breathing passage. This is obviously doable, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some species that work this way, but it seems likely that the reason most animals have the setup we do, after three billion years of evolution, is that it works really well in almost all situations.
Even organisms that evolve on other planets are subject to the same laws of physics as the ones here; six-foot-tall exoskeletal insects are not feasible, simply because exoskeletal structures can't support the weight of a creature six feet tall. (Or so I've been led to believe.) But it requires a brain of a certain size in order to develop general intelligence capable of abstract thought and problem-solving the way humans can. Combine those two and it's easy to see that creatures can't really be small enough to have an exoskeleton and yet also large enough to have a brain capable of human-level intelligence.
And intelligence isn't just brainpower; it's also the ability to manipulate the environment in order to experiment upon it. This requires appendages with fine enough motor control to manipulate small objects in a precise manner, which pretty much rules out any sea creature: Sea creatures need flattened, webbed appendages in order to swim, and those wouldn't be very good at fine manipulation. Fish-people ain't gonna happen.
Okay, that's enough speculation. But I do think it's not THAT unlikely that other intelligent races would be bipedal, upright, large-brained, and endowed with fine manipulators on their upper appendages. Maybe they'd have evolved from catlike or doglike or birdlike creatures instead of apelike creatures, but...
(As you might imagine, this also spawned a huge number of posted photographs of it all over the Web.)
I'm actually rather surprised this hasn't gone to court -- I severely doubt that the state's interest in protecting the artist's copyright would be found to trump the public's interest in being able to take photographs of art placed on public land, even if it was paid for by a private entity and not the government. And before someone tries to claim that there's no law explicitly saying you can take photographs in public, it's quite definitely part of the First Amendment; the ability to record what occurs in public is instrumental in ensuring freedom of the press.
To be more precise, I firmly believe that the copyright interest does not trump the public's interest. I'm only pretty sure that most courts would agree.
Seriously, I can't think of an otherwise plausible tech that's been vaporware longer than light- or holography-based data storage. I know there have been working examples for years, and I think there's even a (really, really expensive, very specialized) production version or two, but come on! How hard can this be?
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This is a meaningless statistic without more information. We don't know how many drives this is (for all we know, you could have bought a drive ten years ago, it failed after two days, and then you bought another drive that's still going strong).
Also, what does "50% failure rate" mean to you? That 50% of the drives you've purchased within the last ten years have, so far, failed? After how long? The following pattern would be a "50% failure rate" but would also be considered totally acceptable by, you know, normal people:
Year 1: Buy a 10 GB drive (drive A).
Year 2: Buy a 20 GB drive (drive B).
Later in year 2: Drive A fails.
Year 4: Buy a 40 GB drive (drive C).
Year 6: Buy an 80 GB drive (drive D).
Year 8: Drive B fails.
End of year 10: Drives C and D are still going strong. Drive A only lasted 1.5 years but drive B lasted 6 years. You bought four drives and two eventually failed. That's a "50% failure rate" but I don't really see how it's a problem.
Maybe "failure rate" means "immediately"? Like, of all the drives you bought in the last ten years, half of them failed out of the box? Gosh, maybe that info would have been useful in your post?
The trickiest thing about security is that there's no reliable way to tell for sure whether it's worked or not. Any security system can be defeated by a properly designed attack, although for a given system this may never happen if there's no one who has both the resources and desire to defeat it.
But the trick is, a sufficiently well-planned attack can defeat security without anyone knowing it happened. So you can't really rely on a count like the number of detected intrusions (whether they were thwarted or not). The result of this fact is that there's a huge amount of crosstalk about "best practices" and what's Good Security and what's not. You could have a system that tracks N intrusions per year, and thwarts them all, but if there were 2N intrusions that were not detected (let alone thwarted)... you go around claiming you've got great security, but do you really?
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have security, obviously, but it does mean that security is a giant, tricky grey area.
You leave the FSM out of this, heretic!
The jury system is an incredibly important part of our freedom and it doesn't do us any good for you to act like it's beneath you to serve on a jury.
I used to feel the same way, until I got called to jury duty (bitching and moaning)... and then I served on a jury. And it was a fantastic experience. Yes, boring at times, but I had books to read when the judge and counsel were having private sidebars.
Back when you spent a week at the courthouse whether they needed you or not, yeah, I can understand it being annoying. These days you're more likely than not to spend only a day, and sometimes not even that, since you can call in by phone and find out whether they even need you to come down.
You also never see Wil Wheaton and Batman in the same photograph, either.
Or Batman and Hitler, for that matter.
President Bush! I didn't know you read Slashdot, sir. No wonder you never get any work done.
The apostrophes are in the wrong place. It should read:
Chicago Developing Suspicious 'Behavior Monitoring System'
Hm, I'd say it's more like a nine-legged dog that's had six legs removed.
Seriously, does he think it's that difficult for people to conceive of something with three legs?
Her concern is extremely mature; specifically it's related to Group B streptococcus infections, which are the "leading cause of death" among neonates. However, the actual incidence of death is very low (1 per 10,000 live births), and yet because it's been touted as the "leading cause of death" in the obstetrics domain for several years, obstetrics practices are really uptight about it -- more so than is really necessary. This is the kind of thing she's talking about :)
Anyway, just because there are worse problems in the world doesn't mean we can't tackle more than one of them at a time. Murder is no doubt a worse problem than vandalism, but we also devote resources to preventing vandalism and prosecuting vandals.
My wife pointed out that the phrase "the leading cause of death" is one we need to be careful of, because it only tells you what caused the *most* deaths, not whether something causes an unacceptably large amount of deaths. (Yes, yes, what's an "acceptable death," bite me.) It came up in the context of neonatal deaths; she pointed out that one day, all causes of neonatal death will have been wiped out, and then one newborn will get eaten by a dingo and suddenly dingoes will be the "leading cause of death among newborns," and we'll have an uproar about dingo eradication...
What we really need is to define the standard metric unit of illegality. Here's some options:
- Five-megabyte unauthorized song downloads
- Men's room foot-tappings
- CIA agent identity leakings
- Sports memorabilia thievings
Come up with your own!
As it happens, Solar Powered Vampires is opening at the Whisky a Go Go tomorrow night.
I wonder how often they go around saying to people, "Whoa. I know Kevin Fu."
Yes, he's a troll, but here's an important thing for everyone to remember: the phrase "activist judge" is a synonym for "a judge who made a ruling I don't like."
The GPL is about restricting the freedom of developers so as to provide more freedom for users. The BSD license is the other way around. But there are a lot more users than developers.
Besides, there are plenty of other cases of "restricting freedom" in order to advance another goal -- for example, your freedom to inflict bodily harm on people is greatly restricted, so as to advance the goal of a peaceful society.
Unrestrained competition does not generally promote freedom; it generally promotes feudalism. No, I'm not joking. Half the point of government intervention in markets is to deal with market failures: situations where an unrestricted market does NOT generate an optimal result. Health care, transportation, and utilities are all examples where unregulated systems invariably lead to abusive oligarchies. (This is not to say that regulation is perfect, obviously, but we could spend lifetimes arguing economics.
However that's not especially relevant to the GPL; nobody is forcing the GPL on anyone, they're merely providing it as the license they encourage people to use.
I'm not familiar with the AGPL at all so I can't comment on point 3.
I think the FSF would contend that how "other people benefit from the code" is affected by more than just how other people can directly use/compile/modify the code. To them, being able to close source code hurts things overall more than allowing someone to close the source helps things. Whether this is true is of course arguable.
:)
The FSF's "philosophical" position is one intended to achieve a practical result -- better software, a better society. Besides, the idea that the GPL can make things better is a falsifiable claim, whereas religious dogma is not
...that "so many nerds" are libertarians, it's probably because nerds don't do well with the kind of chaotic, unpredictable systems you find in politics, and so they insist we have as little politics as possible. :)
Of course, there are plenty of highly political nerds with social views besides libertarianism, so don't reply with that "But I'm a socialist/conservative nerd!" piffle. We're talking about a (claimed) statistical trend, here.
This is a good general method, but there are some problems in certain environments. My company, for example, runs a massive load-balanced server farm; we can't really use PHP sessions because two successive requests from the same user may go to separate servers.
Locking to IP address is a non-starter because there are ISPs who will rotate their visible IP range dynamically, so that user A might appear to be coming from IP X on one request, and from IP Y on the subsequent request. Then that's user's screwed.
Right, so because you have only had to replace one battery in the last five years, therefore Apple made the right call in having a non-user-replaceable battery? The plural of "anecdote" is not "data," dude.
I think the logic is that the government has managed to fail keeping things secret many times, including things that were considered just as important. (Past a certain point, things can't really get any more urgent or important, anyway.) Therefore the odds of something like this actually having happened as is suspected, and successfully being kept secret for sixty years, are tiny.
To rephrase: The government has never been good at keeping huge secrets secret, therefore it's more likely that there was no alien crash than that there was one and the government has successfully hidden all evidence for sixty years.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but I think that's the argument they're making.
Let me brainstorm for a minute. Don't take any of this as gospel, I'm neither an evolutionary biologist nor especially knowledgable about life on other planets
Not necessarily. There's only so many variations on relative sensory organ placement, and many of them will not work as well in a variety of environments as ours does. If your eyes are below your nose, for example, then your breathing passage has to go down past the eyes, while your optic nerve has to wend around the breathing passage. This is obviously doable, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some species that work this way, but it seems likely that the reason most animals have the setup we do, after three billion years of evolution, is that it works really well in almost all situations.
Even organisms that evolve on other planets are subject to the same laws of physics as the ones here; six-foot-tall exoskeletal insects are not feasible, simply because exoskeletal structures can't support the weight of a creature six feet tall. (Or so I've been led to believe.) But it requires a brain of a certain size in order to develop general intelligence capable of abstract thought and problem-solving the way humans can. Combine those two and it's easy to see that creatures can't really be small enough to have an exoskeleton and yet also large enough to have a brain capable of human-level intelligence.
And intelligence isn't just brainpower; it's also the ability to manipulate the environment in order to experiment upon it. This requires appendages with fine enough motor control to manipulate small objects in a precise manner, which pretty much rules out any sea creature: Sea creatures need flattened, webbed appendages in order to swim, and those wouldn't be very good at fine manipulation. Fish-people ain't gonna happen.
Okay, that's enough speculation. But I do think it's not THAT unlikely that other intelligent races would be bipedal, upright, large-brained, and endowed with fine manipulators on their upper appendages. Maybe they'd have evolved from catlike or doglike or birdlike creatures instead of apelike creatures, but...
I'm actually rather surprised this hasn't gone to court -- I severely doubt that the state's interest in protecting the artist's copyright would be found to trump the public's interest in being able to take photographs of art placed on public land, even if it was paid for by a private entity and not the government. And before someone tries to claim that there's no law explicitly saying you can take photographs in public, it's quite definitely part of the First Amendment; the ability to record what occurs in public is instrumental in ensuring freedom of the press.
To be more precise, I firmly believe that the copyright interest does not trump the public's interest. I'm only pretty sure that most courts would agree.
I think this story is a dupe from, like, 1993.
Seriously, I can't think of an otherwise plausible tech that's been vaporware longer than light- or holography-based data storage. I know there have been working examples for years, and I think there's even a (really, really expensive, very specialized) production version or two, but come on! How hard can this be?
I guess you missed where she said "I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be."