Guys, you are assuming too many things. In particular, you are assuming that Microsoft will do things that you consider illegal that nobody at Microsoft said they will do.
They say the system will be able to share music while DRMing it to limit play to three times/three days. They don't say that will be done systematically. In particular it is unlikely this system will apply to music that's not protected in the first place and it will most probably only apply to music downloaded from Microsoft's services (music from other sources will not have the necessary information to refer to a source when you connect the Zune to your PC). Non DRMd music will either not be shareable (unlikely) or freely shareable withot involving DRM.
But, really, you WANT Microsoft to do the wrong thing. It would make many of you sooo happy if they did...
Some issues with your numbers:
The odds of a single person being subject to some kind of search on any single opportunity are not one in a hundred, they are, based on my observations (and I do international flights about twice a month, local flights even more often, over about twenty countries but half of it in the states, so I know what I'm saying), closer to one in five.
Second, you forgot to multiply your number by the number of total events.
So the odds that a single person is searched ten times in a row would be close to one in ten millions. There are approximately one billion plane passengers each year, so if you multiply the odds for each passenger by the number of passengers in a few years you would have thousands of them subject to apparent profiling but in reality being victims of math.
I'm not saying there's no profiling. I'm saying there's no indication of profiling from the fact that a few subjects claim they've been searched more often than it would seem reasonable.
PS: I passed my two statistic courses in the university with perfect scores, thank you.
Or they could use some of Negroponte's machines, after buying them from their original recipients. It would be cheaper and easier to handle on a person's lap.
What? That it wouldn't be fair because it would imply using subsidized hardware for a mean different than the one intended by the ones paying the subsidies? How is that different from what's going on now?
What are the odds that, on a group of a million travelers being randomly chosen for a check (say, checking one in a hundred), one of them is selected ten times in a row for a check?
Basic statistics will tell you that the odds that someone is are close to 100%.
So the fact that your father in law is one of those cases tells me very little, as it is expectable that someone will be in that situation in a large population (actually, lots of such cases are expected).
The only way to actually determine if the checks are random is to conduct a scientific test, by chosing a large enough group of subjects and following them through security and analyzing if there are any statistically significant abnormalities.
Not that I think that random searches are useful. I actually think they are useless, as they do not deter a large group of people willing to die for their cause. They can be caught as many times as you want, if one of them reaches the target, their objective (which is not killing 100 passengers but terrorizing millions) is accomplished. Despite being almost constantly searched probably due to my aspect, I'd rather go with racial profiling, as the reduction of necessary scans is so significant that even scanned people are inconvenienced less on average. Of course, this only works as long as the vast majority of potential attackers respond to a specific racial profile (so far, it's been the case) but once they start recruiting people that do not respond to that physical profile, it becomes useless.
Buying and transporting books IS expensive. Yes. But buying and transporting (and supporting, and getting people trained for) a computer is even more so.
Lets's start with this not being a $100 computer. It is actually a $200 (probably $250) computer subsidized at point of origin and built by non for profit companies (according to Negroponte's statements). Then filled with books from companies that have dissed their royalties.
Compare that with books. If you got books made by non for profit companies that didn't have to pay royalties for the content, were distributed for free by the government and didn't have to be hardcover, top quality, how much would they cost? $1? $2 a piece? Given the cost of paper, that's probably it. Now, with $250 you can buy probably two hundred books. Since this is not rush delivery, distributing those books can be done for probably less than $1 a book in bulk via truck (transport is cheap in most third world countries if you don't care about speed or careful handling), so let's say you get 100 books at destination.
Now, obviously a kid will not read 100 books simultaneously, and you might get to teach to 100 children with the same money you buy one laptop. And the books will probably last a decade, not have to be supported or get people trained for, and be less likely to get resold.
So if the laptops are going to be used mainly for replacing books, they are an awful deal. With the money spent for those 500 kids they could be buying and deploying books for fifty thousand children if not more. If the computers are going to be used for other things then the math might be different, but I still seriously doubt this machine is the right solution, as the design is so full of unproven factors that it has a 99% chance of having serious problems. And many of them might not be easy (or possible at all) to solve.
As I said, I don't like Bush. And I'm not American, or even European.
But the fact is there have been zero successful attacks in the US since 9/11.
Who are the two main targets for muslim terrorists? The US and Israel.
What are the two most important places where they aren't successfully committing any large scale terror attacks?
The US and Israel.
So is the Bushes invasion to Irak, Afghanistan and other countries good for the world? Definitely no. Almost every country has lost something since 9/11, the world's economy has suffered a big downturn and no one feels safe.
Did the war acheive it's purported result of stopping terror attacks on the US? Yes, it has.
On 9/11 lots of people said "this is the end, other than completely nuking the middle east, there's no way stopping this. And since nuking a billion innocent people is no alternatie, we are doomed to hundreds of terror attacks on our own land. It is only to get worse". But Bush has managed to stop it. It has not been very efficient (it costed trillions to the US, it has killed thousands of innocents and it has disrupted the whole world), ethically correct or actually good for the world, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for them. They defined a specific objective and so far they've accomplished it.
That would be great. Until some group of white morons decide to put a few bombs or blow up a plane (wait, it has happened before!).
Then every white american is on the no fly list. And you are left wondering what you have done to deserve that.
It looks like you have a bit of information we don't have! That's great. Now tell us, how do you make to distinguish between a recipient with gel or liquid explosives and medicines? What's the way to differentiate between a bomb detonator and an iPod? How do you quickly distinguish a terrorist from a normal traveler without going through his stuff, scanning him, talking to him or even checking his picture?
Or you are just saying that, because you don't understand every detail on how to stop a terrorist attack we should just go ahead and let the terrorists board the planes with their bombs?
Overreaction in these cases is more than justified. It takes some time (a few weeks at least) to design a specific and appropriately sized procedure for handling with such a threat. In the meantime you have to block anything that might be of concern. And at this point, it looks like every liquid or sealed container is of concern.
I guess if on 9/10/2001 somebody had proposed searching through travelers luggage to block the boarding of passengers with cutters you wSo itould have complained just as hard. But it would surely have changed the world we currently live in.
I don't like Bush a bit, but I find your argument absurd.
Al Quaeda might be as large as they want, but they are failing. This news is about a STOPPED attack. IIRC in 9/11 the airplanes actually hit their targets.
This attack, and the few previous ones (along with a few we probably don't know about) have all been foiled by the guys you are criticizing.
I don't know if it is the right strategy, as leaving those guys alone might be a better solution. Maybe the war on terror is out of proportion, maybe it is unfair. But it seems to be it is being effective at foiling attacks.
A better way to become invisible is not to bend light but to change it's frequency. For example you could (energy and health problems aside) create a field that multiples the light frequency in some specific way (for example, divides wavelenght by 50) so your body becomes transparent to it since it is in the X-Ray range. Then, when the light comes out of the field it is returned to the visible spectra. Or photons could be transformed into large quantities of non interacting particles (such as neutrinos) and then back to light.
That way you are invisible and the system doesn't have to bend light and then get it back in the direction and exact line it was going for every possible point in the covered area and in every direction at the same time (the problem with current cloaking devices, they only work from a specific angle).
As for how to see, the system could implement a smaller field surrounding your eyes doing the inverse process. If it is working for some small fraction of the particles (something like 10%) your eyes would be barely visible, and you would still be able to see in a well lit environment.
And the debt surely came out of thin air.
See, I live in one of those countries in debt. And we smoked the money. They gave us money, and we wasted it. So we asked for more money. And we again wasted it. And that's been going on for decades. Now we say that if we didn't have to pay the debt, we would be able to elliminate hunger and poverty. But that's not true. If we didn't have a debt, we would get one. And the extra cash in the interim would go to some of the same crooks that wasted it the first time (or their sons).
ANd what was Microsoft's misbehaviour? They included a browser with the OS, something every other OS producing company does today (there's no denying that was the whole excuse for the trial, even though they later changed the speech when this argument became patently ridiculous).
They were also accused of doing large discounts for buyers of several products (also, something that every other company does), of not embedding competitors products within their products (who would do that?) and of underpricing products (OK, some states sued them for overpricing, some for underpricing, all over the same products with the same prices).
So tell me they were sued for doing something that not every single competitor was doing, something really bad, and not for being too powerful, too successful and too dangerous.
And now in Europe, where they are complaining that Windows doesn't carry Realnetworks products inside and that Microsoft doesn't make available to others documents they don't have available internally (because they don't exist). Tell me that's the real issue, and not that Microsoft is too influencial for the liking of the EU leaders.
It's the ones that require admin privileges to work. If it weren't for those, most users would be running as normal user, and most (but not all) vulnerabilities would be mitigated.
I'm amazed when I see stuff like financial management apps that require admin privileges. There's no excuse for that.
As if you couldn't do that in most Unix releases from 1990...
SAM is a technology that hasn't aged well, but fifteen years ago when it was released it was pretty decent.
let's use enough to turn the moon on its side. That way the poles would be on the original equator, and both those that want to land on the poles for their position and those wanting to land on the equator for its geology would be happy.
And move it closer so we can go over the weekends.
Fact is we don't know if an embryo is a human or not. It depends on how you define human. And about it being morally wrong or not, it also depends on your views and your moral standards.
But I see an easy solution to all this trouble.
Allow for the creation (and experimentation of any kind) of embryos that have been created from genetically modified material so they cannot possibly become human beings. For example, by modifying a few genes you can create DNA that won't develop a neo cortex. Or even that won't develop a brain.
That way, any objections about embryos being humans are eliminated. The scientific community has the freedom to do the needed experiments that could save lives, and those that think an embryo or anything with the potential to become a full human being has rights are assured that no human or potential human is harmed.
Yes, some will see the view of labs creating brainless zombies as terrifying, but those are easier to debate preconceptions based on too many bad movies, whereas the discussion of the humanity and rights of embryos will never end, since it's based on the deep beliefs of different parts of the society.
Nowhere in the article (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39247539,00.ht m) says that. It clearly says that the measurement was done on a sunday. No other measurements are mentioned. The word Monday doesn't show in the article. Every other survey available points to around 10%. Please shut up and go live in your fantasy world.
Actually, they are different. The implementation of RMS, while it is certaily a form of DRM, is clearly aimed at corporations controlling distribution of internal information. If you install the service and check it out you'll see it is clearly not designed to handle distribution of products in the wild, as it is based around corporate identity management (Active Directory).
While it is possible that this will nonetheless be used by media companies to protect their products, it certainly doesn't seem very efficient, and the companies will probably rather use their own technologies. Which is a shame, because the worst things about DRM are related to the implementation content publishers have chosen, like being device centric instead of user centric (RMS is the later), being obstrusive (RMS is not significantly obstrusive, though it could be improved) and requiring the installation of additional software by each content producer (which broad adoption of RMS should solve).
I hope RMS is improved in the future so it solves its limitations and gets adopted by media companies. Since DRM seems unstoppable, let's home there is a single, unobstrusive and flexible system in use, instead of hundreds of more obstrusive, limiting and potentially dangerous systems designed by the media companies.
Jokes aside, the fact that the measurement was done on a sunday indicates they intended to fool people.
Come on, this is web measurement. It's actually more work to get the measurement done for sundays that to do it for a date range. They chose to include only sundays because it showed what they wanted to claim: that Firefox usage was high.
If they wanted to show the truth they could have just used a weeklong sample for their statistics and get a real number for what FF usage really is.
This not "slightly skewing results". It's just faking them. The broad variation in share between the different admins that posted their results shows that there's a wide variation depending on user's patterns, so any kind of significant filtering makes the results simply invalid.
But I guess claiming that FF is around 10% wouldn't make it to the news.
What?
It was not. The Microsft's fix was out way before the WINE one. And I'm pretty sure the WINE guys didn't have to test one hundredth of the scenarios Microsoft tested.
Slashdot Mirror
Guys, you are assuming too many things. In particular, you are assuming that Microsoft will do things that you consider illegal that nobody at Microsoft said they will do. They say the system will be able to share music while DRMing it to limit play to three times/three days. They don't say that will be done systematically. In particular it is unlikely this system will apply to music that's not protected in the first place and it will most probably only apply to music downloaded from Microsoft's services (music from other sources will not have the necessary information to refer to a source when you connect the Zune to your PC). Non DRMd music will either not be shareable (unlikely) or freely shareable withot involving DRM. But, really, you WANT Microsoft to do the wrong thing. It would make many of you sooo happy if they did...
Some issues with your numbers: The odds of a single person being subject to some kind of search on any single opportunity are not one in a hundred, they are, based on my observations (and I do international flights about twice a month, local flights even more often, over about twenty countries but half of it in the states, so I know what I'm saying), closer to one in five. Second, you forgot to multiply your number by the number of total events. So the odds that a single person is searched ten times in a row would be close to one in ten millions. There are approximately one billion plane passengers each year, so if you multiply the odds for each passenger by the number of passengers in a few years you would have thousands of them subject to apparent profiling but in reality being victims of math. I'm not saying there's no profiling. I'm saying there's no indication of profiling from the fact that a few subjects claim they've been searched more often than it would seem reasonable. PS: I passed my two statistic courses in the university with perfect scores, thank you.
Or they could use some of Negroponte's machines, after buying them from their original recipients. It would be cheaper and easier to handle on a person's lap. What? That it wouldn't be fair because it would imply using subsidized hardware for a mean different than the one intended by the ones paying the subsidies? How is that different from what's going on now?
What are the odds that, on a group of a million travelers being randomly chosen for a check (say, checking one in a hundred), one of them is selected ten times in a row for a check? Basic statistics will tell you that the odds that someone is are close to 100%. So the fact that your father in law is one of those cases tells me very little, as it is expectable that someone will be in that situation in a large population (actually, lots of such cases are expected). The only way to actually determine if the checks are random is to conduct a scientific test, by chosing a large enough group of subjects and following them through security and analyzing if there are any statistically significant abnormalities. Not that I think that random searches are useful. I actually think they are useless, as they do not deter a large group of people willing to die for their cause. They can be caught as many times as you want, if one of them reaches the target, their objective (which is not killing 100 passengers but terrorizing millions) is accomplished. Despite being almost constantly searched probably due to my aspect, I'd rather go with racial profiling, as the reduction of necessary scans is so significant that even scanned people are inconvenienced less on average. Of course, this only works as long as the vast majority of potential attackers respond to a specific racial profile (so far, it's been the case) but once they start recruiting people that do not respond to that physical profile, it becomes useless.
Buying and transporting books IS expensive. Yes. But buying and transporting (and supporting, and getting people trained for) a computer is even more so. Lets's start with this not being a $100 computer. It is actually a $200 (probably $250) computer subsidized at point of origin and built by non for profit companies (according to Negroponte's statements). Then filled with books from companies that have dissed their royalties. Compare that with books. If you got books made by non for profit companies that didn't have to pay royalties for the content, were distributed for free by the government and didn't have to be hardcover, top quality, how much would they cost? $1? $2 a piece? Given the cost of paper, that's probably it. Now, with $250 you can buy probably two hundred books. Since this is not rush delivery, distributing those books can be done for probably less than $1 a book in bulk via truck (transport is cheap in most third world countries if you don't care about speed or careful handling), so let's say you get 100 books at destination. Now, obviously a kid will not read 100 books simultaneously, and you might get to teach to 100 children with the same money you buy one laptop. And the books will probably last a decade, not have to be supported or get people trained for, and be less likely to get resold. So if the laptops are going to be used mainly for replacing books, they are an awful deal. With the money spent for those 500 kids they could be buying and deploying books for fifty thousand children if not more. If the computers are going to be used for other things then the math might be different, but I still seriously doubt this machine is the right solution, as the design is so full of unproven factors that it has a 99% chance of having serious problems. And many of them might not be easy (or possible at all) to solve.
As I said, I don't like Bush. And I'm not American, or even European. But the fact is there have been zero successful attacks in the US since 9/11. Who are the two main targets for muslim terrorists? The US and Israel. What are the two most important places where they aren't successfully committing any large scale terror attacks? The US and Israel. So is the Bushes invasion to Irak, Afghanistan and other countries good for the world? Definitely no. Almost every country has lost something since 9/11, the world's economy has suffered a big downturn and no one feels safe. Did the war acheive it's purported result of stopping terror attacks on the US? Yes, it has. On 9/11 lots of people said "this is the end, other than completely nuking the middle east, there's no way stopping this. And since nuking a billion innocent people is no alternatie, we are doomed to hundreds of terror attacks on our own land. It is only to get worse". But Bush has managed to stop it. It has not been very efficient (it costed trillions to the US, it has killed thousands of innocents and it has disrupted the whole world), ethically correct or actually good for the world, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for them. They defined a specific objective and so far they've accomplished it.
That would be great. Until some group of white morons decide to put a few bombs or blow up a plane (wait, it has happened before!). Then every white american is on the no fly list. And you are left wondering what you have done to deserve that.
It looks like you have a bit of information we don't have! That's great. Now tell us, how do you make to distinguish between a recipient with gel or liquid explosives and medicines? What's the way to differentiate between a bomb detonator and an iPod? How do you quickly distinguish a terrorist from a normal traveler without going through his stuff, scanning him, talking to him or even checking his picture? Or you are just saying that, because you don't understand every detail on how to stop a terrorist attack we should just go ahead and let the terrorists board the planes with their bombs? Overreaction in these cases is more than justified. It takes some time (a few weeks at least) to design a specific and appropriately sized procedure for handling with such a threat. In the meantime you have to block anything that might be of concern. And at this point, it looks like every liquid or sealed container is of concern. I guess if on 9/10/2001 somebody had proposed searching through travelers luggage to block the boarding of passengers with cutters you wSo itould have complained just as hard. But it would surely have changed the world we currently live in.
I don't like Bush a bit, but I find your argument absurd. Al Quaeda might be as large as they want, but they are failing. This news is about a STOPPED attack. IIRC in 9/11 the airplanes actually hit their targets. This attack, and the few previous ones (along with a few we probably don't know about) have all been foiled by the guys you are criticizing. I don't know if it is the right strategy, as leaving those guys alone might be a better solution. Maybe the war on terror is out of proportion, maybe it is unfair. But it seems to be it is being effective at foiling attacks.
A better way to become invisible is not to bend light but to change it's frequency. For example you could (energy and health problems aside) create a field that multiples the light frequency in some specific way (for example, divides wavelenght by 50) so your body becomes transparent to it since it is in the X-Ray range. Then, when the light comes out of the field it is returned to the visible spectra. Or photons could be transformed into large quantities of non interacting particles (such as neutrinos) and then back to light. That way you are invisible and the system doesn't have to bend light and then get it back in the direction and exact line it was going for every possible point in the covered area and in every direction at the same time (the problem with current cloaking devices, they only work from a specific angle). As for how to see, the system could implement a smaller field surrounding your eyes doing the inverse process. If it is working for some small fraction of the particles (something like 10%) your eyes would be barely visible, and you would still be able to see in a well lit environment.
And the debt surely came out of thin air. See, I live in one of those countries in debt. And we smoked the money. They gave us money, and we wasted it. So we asked for more money. And we again wasted it. And that's been going on for decades. Now we say that if we didn't have to pay the debt, we would be able to elliminate hunger and poverty. But that's not true. If we didn't have a debt, we would get one. And the extra cash in the interim would go to some of the same crooks that wasted it the first time (or their sons).
Maybe to him, running a version that was released three weeks ago for three weeks IS flawless. So it is to me.
It's a BETA, and it was released three weeks ago! Duh!
Even more: You hate microsoft because you think they develop shitty software, but you want them to keep it that way and not to improve their products.
Keep in mind that not much after the Wii's launch the XBox price will be lowered. Nobody knows by how much, but $250 is likely.
ANd what was Microsoft's misbehaviour? They included a browser with the OS, something every other OS producing company does today (there's no denying that was the whole excuse for the trial, even though they later changed the speech when this argument became patently ridiculous). They were also accused of doing large discounts for buyers of several products (also, something that every other company does), of not embedding competitors products within their products (who would do that?) and of underpricing products (OK, some states sued them for overpricing, some for underpricing, all over the same products with the same prices). So tell me they were sued for doing something that not every single competitor was doing, something really bad, and not for being too powerful, too successful and too dangerous. And now in Europe, where they are complaining that Windows doesn't carry Realnetworks products inside and that Microsoft doesn't make available to others documents they don't have available internally (because they don't exist). Tell me that's the real issue, and not that Microsoft is too influencial for the liking of the EU leaders.
It's the ones that require admin privileges to work. If it weren't for those, most users would be running as normal user, and most (but not all) vulnerabilities would be mitigated. I'm amazed when I see stuff like financial management apps that require admin privileges. There's no excuse for that.
As if you couldn't do that in most Unix releases from 1990... SAM is a technology that hasn't aged well, but fifteen years ago when it was released it was pretty decent.
let's use enough to turn the moon on its side. That way the poles would be on the original equator, and both those that want to land on the poles for their position and those wanting to land on the equator for its geology would be happy. And move it closer so we can go over the weekends.
Fact is we don't know if an embryo is a human or not. It depends on how you define human. And about it being morally wrong or not, it also depends on your views and your moral standards. But I see an easy solution to all this trouble. Allow for the creation (and experimentation of any kind) of embryos that have been created from genetically modified material so they cannot possibly become human beings. For example, by modifying a few genes you can create DNA that won't develop a neo cortex. Or even that won't develop a brain. That way, any objections about embryos being humans are eliminated. The scientific community has the freedom to do the needed experiments that could save lives, and those that think an embryo or anything with the potential to become a full human being has rights are assured that no human or potential human is harmed. Yes, some will see the view of labs creating brainless zombies as terrifying, but those are easier to debate preconceptions based on too many bad movies, whereas the discussion of the humanity and rights of embryos will never end, since it's based on the deep beliefs of different parts of the society.
Nowhere in the article (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39247539,00.ht m) says that. It clearly says that the measurement was done on a sunday. No other measurements are mentioned. The word Monday doesn't show in the article. Every other survey available points to around 10%. Please shut up and go live in your fantasy world.
Actually, they are different. The implementation of RMS, while it is certaily a form of DRM, is clearly aimed at corporations controlling distribution of internal information. If you install the service and check it out you'll see it is clearly not designed to handle distribution of products in the wild, as it is based around corporate identity management (Active Directory). While it is possible that this will nonetheless be used by media companies to protect their products, it certainly doesn't seem very efficient, and the companies will probably rather use their own technologies. Which is a shame, because the worst things about DRM are related to the implementation content publishers have chosen, like being device centric instead of user centric (RMS is the later), being obstrusive (RMS is not significantly obstrusive, though it could be improved) and requiring the installation of additional software by each content producer (which broad adoption of RMS should solve). I hope RMS is improved in the future so it solves its limitations and gets adopted by media companies. Since DRM seems unstoppable, let's home there is a single, unobstrusive and flexible system in use, instead of hundreds of more obstrusive, limiting and potentially dangerous systems designed by the media companies.
Jokes aside, the fact that the measurement was done on a sunday indicates they intended to fool people. Come on, this is web measurement. It's actually more work to get the measurement done for sundays that to do it for a date range. They chose to include only sundays because it showed what they wanted to claim: that Firefox usage was high. If they wanted to show the truth they could have just used a weeklong sample for their statistics and get a real number for what FF usage really is. This not "slightly skewing results". It's just faking them. The broad variation in share between the different admins that posted their results shows that there's a wide variation depending on user's patterns, so any kind of significant filtering makes the results simply invalid. But I guess claiming that FF is around 10% wouldn't make it to the news.
What? It was not. The Microsft's fix was out way before the WINE one. And I'm pretty sure the WINE guys didn't have to test one hundredth of the scenarios Microsoft tested.
Hey, this whole think made me think. What would have happened if someone had copyrighted the concept of Open Source?