Are you saying that we have to 'secure' it before we can expect any level of privacy?
My home isn't completely secure. Get this - I have windows covered in GLASS for crying out loud... GLASS. Can you beleive that?! I don't know what I was thinking, but there you have it! I really haven't got a clue why the place isn't full of hobos and bums with naught but a lousy glass barrier being all that's keeping them out.
Or maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to locked down like fort knox before we can have a reasonable sense of security and privacy.
I know my email could be read by my ISP, but I mostly trust them not to do it. And I would feel pretty angry and upset if I found out an employee was sitting their reading all my email for kicks. I would expect that he be fired at the very least once caught. If I had anything truly private that I didn't want to risk I would take it upon myself to secure it betterl but just because I didn't encrypt something that doesn't mean I expect or give permission to everyone on the planet to read it.
Why should using IMAP/POP/SMTP instead of HTTP protect your privacy any better? There's no privacy in email unless you use encryption and SSL and own the mail server.
The presumption with a *pure* webmail system, where there is no heavy client downloading your messages that ALL your email would be sitting on the webmail server. In 3rd party hands instead of your own.
(That is the scenario the OP suggested when he argued that heavy clients would be entirely replaced by webmail)
Clearly that is riskier in terms of privacy than a classic email system, where for the most part ISPs do not record and store your email for longer than is necessary and/or incidental. Contrast that to permanant by default and recorded systematicaly for a webmail only system.
If someone hacks my ISPs server there is likely very little currently stored on their systems that I'm the slightest bit worried about. If I had my entire email history on gmail and they got hacked I would be considerably more concerned.
This won't solve all your problems, but if you are on OS X it looks like it might make GMail pretty nice to use w/o your browser:
What problems? I don't have any problems. I am perfectly happy using a heavy mail client. Why would I want a solution that addresses one problem when I already have a solution that addresses all of them?
Not that I don't use webmail. I think it has its place, and I'm glad I can access my account via webmail when needed, but its not anywhere near ready to completely replace my heavy mail client. And in some respects, I'm not sure it ever will.
Unless you operate your own MTA, how is web mail any more or less private? Ultimately you rely on those operating your mail account not to peek in your inbox.
The difference is what's going to be in my inbox when they peek.
The last 15 minutes worth of messages plus a smattering of cruft that hasn't been completely overwritten going back maybe a month if they go digging in the deleted items, backups, etc.
Compare that to pretty much "everything you've ever sent or recieved".
Webmail is just a subset of the Gmail services, though.
But its the part of gmail that defines it. Gmail's pop3 is pretty much the same as anyone elses. Except you get more space than usual, and you pay for it with a privacy policy that no one should be willing to submit to.
That said, most of your counter-examples come down to using gmails pop3. Which presumes using a 'heavy client' which nullifies the op's suggestion that 'heavy clients' are obsolete.
Anyway, one big advantage for me with webmail is that it has the environment independence going for it. Not just platform or software independence, but usually not even dependent on your OS configuration or software installs. That's a pretty big one for me.
Which is why I agree that webmail complements a good mail client, but it doesn't replace it.
1) Decent integration with -other- applications is non-existent. (even simple stuff like sending an attachment from the windows desktop, or the iphoto / mail.app link on OSX) webmail doesn't compare.
2) When I decide to just quit all windows of my web-browser to clean up my desktop I hate that the mail gets closed too. I like that its a separate application, one that doesn't crash when I visit a website that kills the browser.
3) No offline functionality.
4) Large Attachments have to be 'downloaded' when I need them. I often leave stuff as email attachments, and then just open the attachment when I need to look at it. On my 'heavy' mail client its a fraction of a second to open it.
5) PRIVACY. You can't rely on that with webmail.
6) User experience. Gmail is 'comparable' to a real application, in the same way that a mock-up looks like a real product. From 4 feet away it might even look the same, but start using it and its immediately obvious you are using a web based application. Maybe one day that won't be true; but 'html + javascript + xmlrequest' won't be the platform its built on.
Webmail is a great technology but it doesn't replace a good mail client, it complements it.
When I inform them that they need their own, they ask how much. I inform them of AVG and ClamAv* and that those two are at no cost. They then state they cannot be any good if they are free and they go buy either Norton or McAfee.
Perhaps you should listen to them. Many ISPs do provide free antivirus software as part of their service. Its true that you do still have to install it, but that's a separate issue.
For example, in my area, we have Shaw for cable, and Telus for DSL:
Both are free as part of your broadband service subscription.
As an added bonus, if a user has a problem with either package the ISP customer support will provide them free phone support. Both ISPs phone support, while manned by your typical CS monkeys, is quite responsive, and usually able to handle most basic problems, and is far better than what I've seen users get from Norton and McAfee et al.
If you happen to be a telus or shaw subscriber I wouldn't hesitate to recommend using either of their free packages. You -are- paying for them. I have nothing against ClamAV or AVG, but having them call their ISP instead of us for first level support is worth it.:)
As to 'proportion to his fault', seems reasonable. Convicted of violating the distribution rights for 24 songs, a reasonable fine was applied for each individual conviction.
Reasonable compared to what exactly?
And moreover, when committing the same crime multiple times simultaneously, multiplying the fine by that amount is unusual and stupid except in particularly nasty cases. If you steal a pack of cigarettes vs stealing a carton are you punished 20x the amount for the carton?
If there are 24 songs or 2400 songs its the same single crime, the punishment for the larger folder should perhaps be higher, but not 100x times higher.
If I ever get charged by the RIAA for sharing X number songs that they identified I'm going to start by immediately announcing to the jury that I'm actually guilty of sharing 150,000 songs in my shared folder that I've shared for no personal gain because I did not and still do not beleive that my actions are or should be illegal. (Yes I have a 10,000 CD & LP collection, mostly out of print.) and then insist that if they convict me of copyright infringement that they must award reasonable damages of 9250 per track or around 1.4 billion dollars. Because that price has been established previously, and its both reasonable and fair, and proportional to the harm I've caused.
Nevermind that its orders of magnitude more than the courts awarded vicitims of Agent Orange testing, or to victims of human trafficking, who were forced into prostitution, and raped. Clearly I have caused the greater harm, and should be charged proportionally more.
In fact, what we should REALLY be doing is come forward as a group of 30,000,000 p2p users and admit guilt collectively through a single lawyer, and demand that we also be charged 9250 per track.
Betcha that would make news, "p2p community self assesses its guilt at 27 trillion dollars and wants to know where to drop off cheque?"
(based on an average of 100 songs per user X 30 million users X 9250 per track = 27 trillion dollars)
Of course, shortly after that, rather than actually pay them, we'd just take the 27 trillion, buy controlling interest in the member companies of the RIAA, disband them, and put the music into the public domain. We'd have money left over to tackle the MPAA, buy out Microsoft, establish a moon base, field a larger better funded military than the USA, and buy Canada outright.
Oh forget canada, we could just buy the united states outright, and get the military as part of the bundle. With enough left over to give everyone health care.
Does that drive the point home about how unreasonable this sum of money is for this crime? Indeed, does that drive how absurd criminalizing this is? When the 'damages' that would arise out of convicting everyone who is engaged in it right now are worth some 40% of the total gross domestic product of the entire planet.
He should have known that that not knowing what something was for doesn't prove it has no use. For all we know its the organ that's going to save us from the Great Plague of 2045.
That aside, the God described in the Bible does a metric ton of stuff that makes no sense. And the design of creatures abounds with bizarre useless designs.
Consider the bedbug Xylocaris Maculipennis, whose reproductive process includes "homosexual stabbing rape".
Some bedbug species use a mating plug, where after mating the male 'seals' the female shut so that other males can't mate with it. Clever trick, right. A biological chastity belt.
Well, some species have 'adapted' to this by way of a stabbing rape, where they literally impale the female and bypass the plug. So why would God bother with the 'seal' design, if its not even going to work, and he's going to have males just impale females to get past it?
But it gets better, in the case of the Xylocaris Maclipennis, rather than stab females, it homosexually impales other *males* to inseminates *them*, so that when the the victim male mates with a female the homosexual rapist mates by proxy.
If there is a god, he's got a twisted sense of humor.
That would be true.... if it were impossible for someone in their '50s to memorize a search alg. It's not.
That isn't the point. Most decent grads won't have forgotten stuff like this yet. Most 50 year olds will have. Its not that 50 year olds can't relearn it in 15 seconds from a code sample or a text book... but they'll need that 15 seconds.
I'm willing to bet that if you googled, you could find some details about how google interviews...
That may be true, but what if the same interview questions were posed by StartupX ?
The fact that google happens to be large and popuplar enough that their interview process is fairly well documented by its prior applicants doesn't excuse them from having bad criteria in their interview. If anything it exacerbates the problem because people like you defend their interview process by asserting that you can use these blog posts etc to prepare yourself.
Your argument is that of a strawman. You claim they are discriminating based on age because... you can't recite from memory what others could. You may not like that they want you to do so, but that's their choice and criteria.
Not exactly.
He's not saying they are necessarily intentionally filtering out based on age, but rather the specific criteria is *inherently* biased against age. We all may have been taught how to do a binary search or implement a quicksort or heapsort and when I graduated university those algorithms were in my head, like any good student.
But not any more. I still have my textbooks, I still understand them, I still use them for reference, and I could still write the algorithms if I had to from scratch; well quicksort at least; I wouldn't know where to start on a heapsort anymore without at least glancing at a text to get my bearings. But in the real world you just use a library quicksort 99% of the time.
And I was actually tasked to implement one I'd probably start from an existing source code example rather than waste time writing one from scratch.
The number of people who can implement a quicksort or heapsort from scratch out of their head is definately going to be a rapidly decaying curve as you plot from 'just graduated to nearing retirement'.
And unless the argument can be made that being able to do that (from scratch out of your head) is somehow relevant to the job you are applying for, it would seem to serve little real purpose, intentional or not, of biasing against older applicants.
The trouble is, they probably do want people who =understand= these algorithms, who can estimate the time/space complexity of a given task, etc. And the ability to demonstrate a quicksort is at least in the right ballpark to screen for that. It might not be the best question to probe for the capabilities they really need and want, but most interview processes I've seen are biased against people who are qualified even ideal for the job.
From the technical screening at google to the honesty screening at the local mall retail job, they all reject people who are qualified and even ideal for the job.
On that tangent -- I recall a friend who failed one of those 'honesty tests' apparently because she was honest -- she'd said she "probably wouldn't rat out on a fellow employee she observed using their employee discount to purchase something for their girlfriend/boyfriend". Sure it was the 'wrong' answer, and she knew it, but she figured it was an honest one, and that -she'd- rather hire someone who was genuinely honest rather than someone who simply 'knew' how to pass an honesty test.
They aren't disposable to everyone, for a few reasons--money being the least important. I figure, why fill up the landfill with "broken" toasters when you can open her up, solder something, and be back up & running in a few minutes? Why would you prefer to drive to the store, pay more money, throw away all the new packaging, etc.? To me, THAT is wasteful.
The average person can't repair it themself, so either choice involves driving time, and they're facing a $50 minimum charge just to get it looked at, and possibly fixed, if its repairable.
The economics (not just financial but of time and waste too) make sense for -you- because the time is "free" and the risk/consequences of failure are negligible. If you open it up and find out it needs a $10 part, it costs you a trip to the store and $10, instead of $60 ($50 labour + $10 parts). If you open it up and find out it can't be fixed you've lost 5 minutes of time, instead of 50 bucks and some driving time. If it breaks on you again 3 months down the road and you have to fix it again, you've still lost next to nothing - but the average person would have paid 50 bucks for the first repair, and is facing paying 50 bucks again because they only got a 30 day warranty on the previous repair.
Who would pay $50 once (never mind possibly twice and/or +parts) to repair a 4 year old toaster that only cost $60 brand new?
They solder and go way, way down into the physical layer...when was the last time geeks checked your power supply with a multimeter?
Seriously, who wants that?
I wouldn't want something that failed at the PCB level 'fixed' with a soldering gun and a multimeter, especially if its out of warrant, and therefor old enough that its practicaly worthless. Just pop in a new part.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to pay someone qualified to do that kind of repair for what that kind of service is worth. We pay electrical/technical guys like that to fix $12,000 medical instruments; it makes sense to get a solder jockey to come in with his tools to fix it; $5 in parts $200 in labour and travel time. Its a good deal.
But a 3 year old dell that's worth under $200 (if you fixed it) and could be replaced with somethign new that's twice as fast for $350. Why would you pay to have that old PC fixed? Its like paying to repair a toaster or clock radio. A technician qualified properly qualified to fix it -should- be charging you more than the thing is worth for his time, if he or she is valuing their time appropriately.
A hobbyist or geek who wants to tinker with it sure, but the economics of those devices is that that they are disposable commodities. For high end computers, the parts are disposable commodities; you just don't pay to get a motherboard or powersupply fixed anymore.
Failing that, a few credible witnesses; preferably not your relatives or the people you smoke dope with on the couch. You know, a doctor, lawer, or another professional is ideal. But pretty much anybody will do.
You don't need to -prove- beyond the shadow of a possibility that you might have faked the pictures/signatures to get out of paying.
You just have to convince the judge that of the two people in front of him you are the one telling the truth about the state of the apartment when you moved in. Some disinterested witnesses will go a long way towards convincing him.
If this really worries you, and you are carrying our multiple simultaneous criminal acts, I recommend compartmentalization. Different encryption keys for your different criminal enterprises.
Given that they see encrypted data, and don't know which file contains the child porn they are looking for they will demand the keys to all of them.
Even if you give them the key to file outlining the crime they are interested in first, they'll see the other encrypted files, and pressume there is even more evidence...
Compartmentalization doesn't really get you anywhere.
Better to just say. "No. Figure it out for yourself." And then take the 'obstruction of justice charge'.
People also care quite a bit about being able to see. Yet the cost of eye surgery has seen marked DECREASES. It is not covered by most health care plans.
First you are talking routine lasik-style correction, an *elective* surgery that isn't medically required. People are also able to see using contacts or glasses. Check out other types of eye surgery which aren't elective... I think you'll find a different picture being painted.
Second, so what? At $750 bucks an eye, its not exactly expensive either. Sure it was thousands per eye at one point, and yes, high demand, decreased equipment cost, and a price consumers can actually afford have all conspired to make it a free market success story. -- But you can get the same affordable eye surgery in Canada too. So how exactly does this represent an example of the US system being better than the Canadian one?
There are doctors that do not accept insurance. If you want their services, you pay them yourself. Their rates are much lower than the predominate averages. The reason is that they don't have to maintain multiple staff positions to sort out the paperwork of filing with the insurance companies.
In other words, they make the same as everyone else because they've cut out an expense. (and also cut out a chunk of the customer base to do so).
And as a system of health care its beyond stupid. How many people can afford a triple heart bypass even if they can skip the insurance middleman and go straight to the doctor/hospital with cash? Don't be absurd.
There's no incentive to keep the cost down when someone else is footing the bill, and switching the payer from insurance companies to the government isn't likely to change that.
Canadian's health care system is cheaper than the US's. So evidently somewhere along the line switching payer from a network of insurance companies to goverment did in fact change that.
As for incentive to keep the costs down. Its true when someone else is paying you might order the steak, but with insurance its not like it matters what you order. When you order the steak your boss doesn't usually cut in and say, no, he'll have the salad; and its ok if its a day old salad, in fact, that's all I'm authorizing him to eat; if he still insists he's hungry.
And its no different in Canada, the customer is the government, not the consumer. So we have the same set of issues there.
But unlike corporations its not for profit and its one single customer for the entire country so a lot of administrative overhead, advertising, competition, pandering to short-sighted quarterly earnings obsessed shareholders is cut out of the loop.
This is Amazon. Why would they do that? They make plenty of money selling stuff, and have an excellent reputation. Why would they want to tarnish their reputation by distributing malware - which would have no significant benefits, and plenty of drawbacks?
we should be saying "Why is healthcare so expensive?"
In the US, the answer is simple: because that's what the market will bear. Turns out people will pay pretty much whatever they can afford, and then some, to keep breathing. So, big surprise, that's exactly the price level the free market settled at.
Personally, I'm trying like hell to keep a system like your Canadian Socialized Medicine out of my country (the good ol' USA), so it doesn't bankrupt us.
That's pretty uninformed.
The US spends more per capita on its existing health care system than Canada does. Our health care is better than yours and it costs less, a lot less. Health care in Canada costs 10% of the GDP. Health care in the US costs 15% of the GDP. Hell, if Canada, increased its health care spending to 15% of the GDP; the amount you ALREADY spend on health care, we'd be in amazing shape. That would amount to a 50% funding increase.
A study by the Harvard School of Medicine found:
------------- "Savings gleaned from a national health insurance system like Canada's would be enough to provide medical insurance for the 41 million Americans who now lack coverage, the researchers said."
"The study puts the administrative cost of the U.S. system at $294 billion per year, compared to about $9.4 billion in Canada. That translates to a per-person cost of $1,059 in the U.S. and $307 in Canada. A similar study, conducted in 1991, put per-capita costs in the U.S. at $450 and Canadian costs at one-third of that."...
"Also, the study noted, private insurers spend large sums on marketing and underwriting, costs that the Canadian system doesn't have to bear."
---------------
That last note alone is amusing; and I wish there were some numbers attached to it. What percentage of your private health coverage costs goes towards paying for TV advertising to tell you how great your insurer's coverage is? What percentage of your private health care costs go towards paying marketers and lobbyists to convince congressmen, senators, and people like you that Canada's system is 'teh devil' that will bankrupt your country? There's some real irony there.
Canada's system isn't perfect by a longshot, and if you don't want the system and can come up with something better, I'm listening! Canada wants a better system than its got too. But while you figure out what that system is you'd be considerably further ahead with Canada's system than your own.
Any artist whose art can be mistaken for a biological weapon ought to be detained imho. What was so bad about paintings and sculptures of people and nature that they had to be completely abandoned by modern artists in favor of making mostly stuff that a scrap yard would turn down as too hideous.
Being vindictive to innocent people who have or like things that are complicated or blink is just plain silly.
You are aware, I'm sure, that most real biological weapons and bombs look entirely innocuous. You know, like that guy's briefcase over there. Or the shoe that kid is wearing. Or the sheaf of envelopes that woman is holding, or that thermos the janitor walked by with...
I'm not sure there is one correct piece of information in this post.
I readily concede the examples were more to underline the issues with CPI calculations than exact dollar values.
The assumption is that if steak gets more expensive, people will buy more hamburger. There is a debate on whether this method is proper
There are multiple issues with it, both for and against. If an epidemic of mad cow disease skyrockets the price of beef and people substitute salmon and pork tenderloin, then its a fair substition. The cost of living didn't really go up; the price of beef went nuts, and normal people just stopped buying it.
But the idea of substituting steak for hamburger is absurd. That represents making a sacrifice to ones standard of living in order to stay ahead of the rising cost of groceries, and it shouldn't be masked.
Secondly by tweaking whats in the basket from year to year, it becomes even harder to compare the numbers. If 10 years ago we're dining on steak and salmon, and this year we're dining on hamburgers and fish sticks, and 10 years from now we're gagging back beans and seaweed, and the CPI numbers are telling us things are just fine, then it isn't doing its job.
The price of energy was not taken out. It is still captured in the CPI. However, some people argued that the CPI less food and energy ("Core" CPI) was a better indicator, which I don't really agree with, but the fact is that the numbers are still published by BLS and the mainstream media simply ignores them.
When your wage increases are contractually linked to core-cpi and governments congratulate themselves on low inflation its more than a problem with 'mainstream media'. I realize the numbers are there, but if they aren't being used to make policy decisions because they are politically inconvenient, hiding them under the rug while using a cpi number that is at odds with reality is dishonest. That's not BLS' fault per se, but they should take ownership of it and shout from the rooftops, "hey! core-cpi doesn't reflect what the american's are actually experiencing at all right now, and only an idiot would use it to judge the state of the economy right now."
Also it wasn't recent, it was 1978.
Its only recently that it diverged from core-cpi badly. It didn't really matter that it was excluded when it was rising at the same rate.
BLS is aware of the shortcomings in quality adjustments for technology items, and it is an area of current research. However your example is not correct, the BLS analysts are knowledgeable enough to know that a quad 2GHz != 8 x 1GHz.. and furthermore the weighting that computers get in the overall CPI is small (0.5% for all IT goods/services in December 2006 CPI-W).
As for my example with hedonics, yes I know the BLS isn't that incompetent, but it is a fair example of what hedonics *is*. And pointing out that that computer weighting in the cpi is small is misleading. Hedonics is applied to more than just computers. TV's, Kitchen appliances, Home theatres, alarm clocks, power tools, cars, fishing rods, sports equipment, etc.
Worse the inverse of hedonics isn't applied. When the quality of something is lowered over time, we don't see that loss of quality reflected as a higher cost the same way we see the increase of quality reflected as a lower cost. Consider, for example, ikea furniture which is mostly plastic and particle board.
Because, presumably, you're role playing as a male character. And because it is just a 3D model. And because staring at some dude's ass shouldn't be a issue for anyone secure in their sexuality.
This isn't about insecurity. A guy reading playboy isn't insecure about his sexuality; he's indulging in it. He's not trying to prove he's heterosexual; he's merly being heterosexual. He's been given the choice between looking at a male or female character, he's choosing to look at a female one. Its just that simple.
Most players treat their avatars like the wooden dummies that ventriloquists carry around - it has its own name, and it has its own gender, and its may even have a bit its own personality. But the player is still there with their hand up their back controlling the puppet. Its an extension of themselves, and if the gender of the puppet doesn't match the gender of the ventriloquist, they'd be pretty taken aback if someone tried to 'pick up' their dummy. Mostly they'd wonder what kind of idiot tries to pick up the dummy in the first place, no matter how cute it is. They might not know what the player behind it looks like, but its not like they don't know its a dummy, or that the player isn't there.
What are you going on about? *Whatever* information the server uses to decide whether to update can be sent easily to the client, where the client can make its own decision, without sending information about the client to the server, beyond requesting the information.
Also, since they provide you with a way to turn it off...
Not really.
Sure its open source so you can modify it yourself. And sure its got a plugin system that you can use to break/disable the feature by having the plug-in confuse the software into thinking its already being updated.
That's like buying a car where the headlights can't be turned off, but claiming its not defective because installing a switch yourself isn't -that- hard, if it means that much to you, or you can just disconnect the battery...
Yes. The US has been lying about inflation for a few years now. When the price of steak skyrocketed, for example they took it out of the equation and substituted ground beef.
Recently they took out the cost of energy because it it went up huge; their explanation was that they didn't want it to 'distort' the numbers. (despite the fact that everyone in the country still has to buy gas for their cars and heat their homes so it -should- be reflected.)
Even worse, they have a fucked up system of computing negative inflation. If you bought a single core 1ghz computer 3 years ago and it cost $1000, then today, because you could get a 2ghz quad-core for $1000, you are getting $8000 worth of value; so in the index, the cost of computers has dropped by 75% over the last couple years... despite the fact that the price hasn't really dropped... its not like that 1ghz 1core computer is sitting at walmart for $125, even if you wanted it.
Similiarly if this years model of your car has had standard side airbags, and an improved emissions control system and costs $1000 more, well again inflation is negative, even though the car costs more, becuase they factor in the new features as 'increasing its value more than its cost'; so in some warped bizarro world the cost of buying a new car is deemed to have gone down.
My powerbook is running tons of software with autoupdate features.
Ok.
see this is a great thing and something that a user should have a good reason to turn it off.
You mean like sending needless private information to the parent company without permission or even disclosure?
Why would you wanna be using out of date software, and why the hell would you wanna risk missing a bugfix release that patches some major security flaw?
Well, that's really not the issue being debated here. But even so, if they are patching an issue with a module I don't use and the update contains the risk of creating an issue with a module I do use...what is the advantage of the upgrade exactly? Its not even break even.
I dont know about you, but my time is valuable, and I can't spend the free time I have weeding through RSS feeds for the blogs of all the software I use, let alone take the time to download and install it
And no one is stopping you. I'm not against the software having an autoupdate feature, and I'm not against you using it. So *again*, this is really not the issue being discussed.
The only issue I have is the that the auto update feature is being pushed on users who -don't- want it. Worse, the auto-update feature sends information the server doesn't need to know that they consider irrevant, and even an invasion of privacy.
Its already been stated multiple times that an autoupdate feature doesn't need to send any information to the server at all. It only needs to request the current version number. That's it.
If the end user wants to share statistical information, usage data, installed plugins, and what not else with the developer in order to help the developer tune the product, that's fine too, but it shouldn't be on by default, and only able to be turned off by using hacks or 3rd party plugins.
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Email isn't a secure medium. Get over it.
Are you saying that we have to 'secure' it before we can expect any level of privacy?
My home isn't completely secure. Get this - I have windows covered in GLASS for crying out loud... GLASS. Can you beleive that?! I don't know what I was thinking, but there you have it! I really haven't got a clue why the place isn't full of hobos and bums with naught but a lousy glass barrier being all that's keeping them out.
Or maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to locked down like fort knox before we can have a reasonable sense of security and privacy.
I know my email could be read by my ISP, but I mostly trust them not to do it. And I would feel pretty angry and upset if I found out an employee was sitting their reading all my email for kicks. I would expect that he be fired at the very least once caught. If I had anything truly private that I didn't want to risk I would take it upon myself to secure it betterl but just because I didn't encrypt something that doesn't mean I expect or give permission to everyone on the planet to read it.
Why should using IMAP/POP/SMTP instead of HTTP protect your privacy any better? There's no privacy in email unless you use encryption and SSL and own the mail server.
The presumption with a *pure* webmail system, where there is no heavy client downloading your messages that ALL your email would be sitting on the webmail server. In 3rd party hands instead of your own.
(That is the scenario the OP suggested when he argued that heavy clients would be entirely replaced by webmail)
Clearly that is riskier in terms of privacy than a classic email system, where for the most part ISPs do not record and store your email for longer than is necessary and/or incidental. Contrast that to permanant by default and recorded systematicaly for a webmail only system.
If someone hacks my ISPs server there is likely very little currently stored on their systems that I'm the slightest bit worried about. If I had my entire email history on gmail and they got hacked I would be considerably more concerned.
This won't solve all your problems, but if you are on OS X it looks like it might make GMail pretty nice to use w/o your browser:
What problems? I don't have any problems. I am perfectly happy using a heavy mail client. Why would I want a solution that addresses one problem when I already have a solution that addresses all of them?
Not that I don't use webmail. I think it has its place, and I'm glad I can access my account via webmail when needed, but its not anywhere near ready to completely replace my heavy mail client. And in some respects, I'm not sure it ever will.
Unless you operate your own MTA, how is web mail any more or less private? Ultimately you rely on those operating your mail account not to peek in your inbox.
The difference is what's going to be in my inbox when they peek.
The last 15 minutes worth of messages plus a smattering of cruft that hasn't been completely overwritten going back maybe a month if they go digging in the deleted items, backups, etc.
Compare that to pretty much "everything you've ever sent or recieved".
Webmail is just a subset of the Gmail services, though.
But its the part of gmail that defines it. Gmail's pop3 is pretty much the same as anyone elses. Except you get more space than usual, and you pay for it with a privacy policy that no one should be willing to submit to.
That said, most of your counter-examples come down to using gmails pop3. Which presumes using a 'heavy client' which nullifies the op's suggestion that 'heavy clients' are obsolete.
Anyway, one big advantage for me with webmail is that it has the environment independence going for it. Not just platform or software independence, but usually not even dependent on your OS configuration or software installs. That's a pretty big one for me.
Which is why I agree that webmail complements a good mail client, but it doesn't replace it.
I hate gmail, and webmail interfaces in general.
1) Decent integration with -other- applications is non-existent. (even simple stuff like sending an attachment from the windows desktop, or the iphoto / mail.app link on OSX) webmail doesn't compare.
2) When I decide to just quit all windows of my web-browser to clean up my desktop I hate that the mail gets closed too. I like that its a separate application, one that doesn't crash when I visit a website that kills the browser.
3) No offline functionality.
4) Large Attachments have to be 'downloaded' when I need them. I often leave stuff as email attachments, and then just open the attachment when I need to look at it. On my 'heavy' mail client its a fraction of a second to open it.
5) PRIVACY. You can't rely on that with webmail.
6) User experience. Gmail is 'comparable' to a real application, in the same way that a mock-up looks like a real product. From 4 feet away it might even look the same, but start using it and its immediately obvious you are using a web based application. Maybe one day that won't be true; but 'html + javascript + xmlrequest' won't be the platform its built on.
Webmail is a great technology but it doesn't replace a good mail client, it complements it.
When I inform them that they need their own, they ask how much. I inform them of AVG and ClamAv* and that those two are at no cost. They then state they cannot be any good if they are free and they go buy either Norton or McAfee.
:)
Perhaps you should listen to them. Many ISPs do provide free antivirus software as part of their service. Its true that you do still have to install it, but that's a separate issue.
For example, in my area, we have Shaw for cable, and Telus for DSL:
Shaw: Shaw Secure (powered by F-secure)
https://secure.shaw.ca/apps/shawsecure/
Telus: Telus Internet Security (powered by Zero Knowledge Systems)
http://about.telus.com/bav/jumpL5.html
Both are free as part of your broadband service subscription.
As an added bonus, if a user has a problem with either package the ISP customer support will provide them free phone support. Both ISPs phone support, while manned by your typical CS monkeys, is quite responsive, and usually able to handle most basic problems, and is far better than what I've seen users get from Norton and McAfee et al.
If you happen to be a telus or shaw subscriber I wouldn't hesitate to recommend using either of their free packages. You -are- paying for them. I have nothing against ClamAV or AVG, but having them call their ISP instead of us for first level support is worth it.
cheers
As to 'proportion to his fault', seems reasonable. Convicted of violating the distribution rights for 24 songs, a reasonable fine was applied for each individual conviction.
Reasonable compared to what exactly?
And moreover, when committing the same crime multiple times simultaneously, multiplying the fine by that amount is unusual and stupid except in particularly nasty cases. If you steal a pack of cigarettes vs stealing a carton are you punished 20x the amount for the carton?
If there are 24 songs or 2400 songs its the same single crime, the punishment for the larger folder should perhaps be higher, but not 100x times higher.
If I ever get charged by the RIAA for sharing X number songs that they identified I'm going to start by immediately announcing to the jury that I'm actually guilty of sharing 150,000 songs in my shared folder that I've shared for no personal gain because I did not and still do not beleive that my actions are or should be illegal. (Yes I have a 10,000 CD & LP collection, mostly out of print.) and then insist that if they convict me of copyright infringement that they must award reasonable damages of 9250 per track or around 1.4 billion dollars. Because that price has been established previously, and its both reasonable and fair, and proportional to the harm I've caused.
Nevermind that its orders of magnitude more than the courts awarded vicitims of Agent Orange testing, or to victims of human trafficking, who were forced into prostitution, and raped. Clearly I have caused the greater harm, and should be charged proportionally more.
In fact, what we should REALLY be doing is come forward as a group of 30,000,000 p2p users and admit guilt collectively through a single lawyer, and demand that we also be charged 9250 per track.
Betcha that would make news, "p2p community self assesses its guilt at 27 trillion dollars and wants to know where to drop off cheque?"
(based on an average of 100 songs per user X 30 million users X 9250 per track = 27 trillion dollars)
Of course, shortly after that, rather than actually pay them, we'd just take the 27 trillion, buy controlling interest in the member companies of the RIAA, disband them, and put the music into the public domain. We'd have money left over to tackle the MPAA, buy out Microsoft, establish a moon base, field a larger better funded military than the USA, and buy Canada outright.
Oh forget canada, we could just buy the united states outright, and get the military as part of the bundle. With enough left over to give everyone health care.
Does that drive the point home about how unreasonable this sum of money is for this crime? Indeed, does that drive how absurd criminalizing this is? When the 'damages' that would arise out of convicting everyone who is engaged in it right now are worth some 40% of the total gross domestic product of the entire planet.
This fact disproved God.
Your science teacher was an idiot.
He should have known that that not knowing what something was for doesn't prove it has no use. For all we know its the organ that's going to save us from the Great Plague of 2045.
That aside, the God described in the Bible does a metric ton of stuff that makes no sense. And the design of creatures abounds with bizarre useless designs.
Consider the bedbug Xylocaris Maculipennis, whose reproductive process includes "homosexual stabbing rape".
Some bedbug species use a mating plug, where after mating the male 'seals' the female shut so that other males can't mate with it. Clever trick, right. A biological chastity belt.
Well, some species have 'adapted' to this by way of a stabbing rape, where they literally impale the female and bypass the plug. So why would God bother with the 'seal' design, if its not even going to work, and he's going to have males just impale females to get past it?
But it gets better, in the case of the Xylocaris Maclipennis, rather than stab females, it homosexually impales other *males* to inseminates *them*, so that when the the victim male mates with a female the homosexual rapist mates by proxy.
If there is a god, he's got a twisted sense of humor.
That would be true .... if it were impossible for someone in their '50s to memorize a search alg. It's not.
...
That isn't the point. Most decent grads won't have forgotten stuff like this yet. Most 50 year olds will have. Its not that 50 year olds can't relearn it in 15 seconds from a code sample or a text book... but they'll need that 15 seconds.
I'm willing to bet that if you googled, you could find some details about how google interviews
That may be true, but what if the same interview questions were posed by StartupX ?
The fact that google happens to be large and popuplar enough that their interview process is fairly well documented by its prior applicants doesn't excuse them from having bad criteria in their interview. If anything it exacerbates the problem because people like you defend their interview process by asserting that you can use these blog posts etc to prepare yourself.
Your argument is that of a strawman. You claim they are discriminating based on age because ... you can't recite from memory what others could. You may not like that they want you to do so, but that's their choice and criteria.
Not exactly.
He's not saying they are necessarily intentionally filtering out based on age, but rather the specific criteria is *inherently* biased against age. We all may have been taught how to do a binary search or implement a quicksort or heapsort and when I graduated university those algorithms were in my head, like any good student.
But not any more. I still have my textbooks, I still understand them, I still use them for reference, and I could still write the algorithms if I had to from scratch; well quicksort at least; I wouldn't know where to start on a heapsort anymore without at least glancing at a text to get my bearings. But in the real world you just use a library quicksort 99% of the time.
And I was actually tasked to implement one I'd probably start from an existing source code example rather than waste time writing one from scratch.
The number of people who can implement a quicksort or heapsort from scratch out of their head is definately going to be a rapidly decaying curve as you plot from 'just graduated to nearing retirement'.
And unless the argument can be made that being able to do that (from scratch out of your head) is somehow relevant to the job you are applying for, it would seem to serve little real purpose, intentional or not, of biasing against older applicants.
The trouble is, they probably do want people who =understand= these algorithms, who can estimate the time/space complexity of a given task, etc. And the ability to demonstrate a quicksort is at least in the right ballpark to screen for that. It might not be the best question to probe for the capabilities they really need and want, but most interview processes I've seen are biased against people who are qualified even ideal for the job.
From the technical screening at google to the honesty screening at the local mall retail job, they all reject people who are qualified and even ideal for the job.
On that tangent -- I recall a friend who failed one of those 'honesty tests' apparently because she was honest -- she'd said she "probably wouldn't rat out on a fellow employee she observed using their employee discount to purchase something for their girlfriend/boyfriend". Sure it was the 'wrong' answer, and she knew it, but she figured it was an honest one, and that -she'd- rather hire someone who was genuinely honest rather than someone who simply 'knew' how to pass an honesty test.
They aren't disposable to everyone, for a few reasons--money being the least important. I figure, why fill up the landfill with "broken" toasters when you can open her up, solder something, and be back up & running in a few minutes? Why would you prefer to drive to the store, pay more money, throw away all the new packaging, etc.? To me, THAT is wasteful.
The average person can't repair it themself, so either choice involves driving time, and they're facing a $50 minimum charge just to get it looked at, and possibly fixed, if its repairable.
The economics (not just financial but of time and waste too) make sense for -you- because the time is "free" and the risk/consequences of failure are negligible. If you open it up and find out it needs a $10 part, it costs you a trip to the store and $10, instead of $60 ($50 labour + $10 parts). If you open it up and find out it can't be fixed you've lost 5 minutes of time, instead of 50 bucks and some driving time. If it breaks on you again 3 months down the road and you have to fix it again, you've still lost next to nothing - but the average person would have paid 50 bucks for the first repair, and is facing paying 50 bucks again because they only got a 30 day warranty on the previous repair.
Who would pay $50 once (never mind possibly twice and/or +parts) to repair a 4 year old toaster that only cost $60 brand new?
They solder and go way, way down into the physical layer...when was the last time geeks checked your power supply with a multimeter?
Seriously, who wants that?
I wouldn't want something that failed at the PCB level 'fixed' with a soldering gun and a multimeter, especially if its out of warrant, and therefor old enough that its practicaly worthless. Just pop in a new part.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to pay someone qualified to do that kind of repair for what that kind of service is worth. We pay electrical/technical guys like that to fix $12,000 medical instruments; it makes sense to get a solder jockey to come in with his tools to fix it; $5 in parts $200 in labour and travel time. Its a good deal.
But a 3 year old dell that's worth under $200 (if you fixed it) and could be replaced with somethign new that's twice as fast for $350. Why would you pay to have that old PC fixed? Its like paying to repair a toaster or clock radio. A technician qualified properly qualified to fix it -should- be charging you more than the thing is worth for his time, if he or she is valuing their time appropriately.
A hobbyist or geek who wants to tinker with it sure, but the economics of those devices is that that they are disposable commodities. For high end computers, the parts are disposable commodities; you just don't pay to get a motherboard or powersupply fixed anymore.
Or have a notoray public sign it.
Failing that, a few credible witnesses; preferably not your relatives or the people you smoke dope with on the couch. You know, a doctor, lawer, or another professional is ideal. But pretty much anybody will do.
You don't need to -prove- beyond the shadow of a possibility that you might have faked the pictures/signatures to get out of paying.
You just have to convince the judge that of the two people in front of him you are the one telling the truth about the state of the apartment when you moved in. Some disinterested witnesses will go a long way towards convincing him.
If this really worries you, and you are carrying our multiple simultaneous criminal acts, I recommend compartmentalization. Different encryption keys for your different criminal enterprises.
Given that they see encrypted data, and don't know which file contains the child porn they are looking for they will demand the keys to all of them.
Even if you give them the key to file outlining the crime they are interested in first, they'll see the other encrypted files, and pressume there is even more evidence...
Compartmentalization doesn't really get you anywhere.
Better to just say. "No. Figure it out for yourself." And then take the 'obstruction of justice charge'.
People also care quite a bit about being able to see. Yet the cost of eye surgery has seen marked DECREASES. It is not covered by most health care plans.
First you are talking routine lasik-style correction, an *elective* surgery that isn't medically required. People are also able to see using contacts or glasses. Check out other types of eye surgery which aren't elective... I think you'll find a different picture being painted.
Second, so what? At $750 bucks an eye, its not exactly expensive either. Sure it was thousands per eye at one point, and yes, high demand, decreased equipment cost, and a price consumers can actually afford have all conspired to make it a free market success story. -- But you can get the same affordable eye surgery in Canada too. So how exactly does this represent an example of the US system being better than the Canadian one?
There are doctors that do not accept insurance. If you want their services, you pay them yourself. Their rates are much lower than the predominate averages. The reason is that they don't have to maintain multiple staff positions to sort out the paperwork of filing with the insurance companies.
In other words, they make the same as everyone else because they've cut out an expense. (and also cut out a chunk of the customer base to do so).
And as a system of health care its beyond stupid. How many people can afford a triple heart bypass even if they can skip the insurance middleman and go straight to the doctor/hospital with cash? Don't be absurd.
There's no incentive to keep the cost down when someone else is footing the bill, and switching the payer from insurance companies to the government isn't likely to change that.
Canadian's health care system is cheaper than the US's. So evidently somewhere along the line switching payer from a network of insurance companies to goverment did in fact change that.
As for incentive to keep the costs down. Its true when someone else is paying you might order the steak, but with insurance its not like it matters what you order. When you order the steak your boss doesn't usually cut in and say, no, he'll have the salad; and its ok if its a day old salad, in fact, that's all I'm authorizing him to eat; if he still insists he's hungry.
And its no different in Canada, the customer is the government, not the consumer. So we have the same set of issues there.
But unlike corporations its not for profit and its one single customer for the entire country so a lot of administrative overhead, advertising, competition, pandering to short-sighted quarterly earnings obsessed shareholders is cut out of the loop.
This is Amazon. Why would they do that? They make plenty of money selling stuff, and have an excellent reputation. Why would they want to tarnish their reputation by distributing malware - which would have no significant benefits, and plenty of drawbacks?
Good question. Ask Sony.
we should be saying "Why is healthcare so expensive?"
...
In the US, the answer is simple: because that's what the market will bear. Turns out people will pay pretty much whatever they can afford, and then some, to keep breathing. So, big surprise, that's exactly the price level the free market settled at.
Personally, I'm trying like hell to keep a system like your Canadian Socialized Medicine out of my country (the good ol' USA), so it doesn't bankrupt us.
That's pretty uninformed.
The US spends more per capita on its existing health care system than Canada does. Our health care is better than yours and it costs less, a lot less. Health care in Canada costs 10% of the GDP. Health care in the US costs 15% of the GDP. Hell, if Canada, increased its health care spending to 15% of the GDP; the amount you ALREADY spend on health care, we'd be in amazing shape. That would amount to a 50% funding increase.
A study by the Harvard School of Medicine found:
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"Savings gleaned from a national health insurance system like Canada's would be enough to provide medical insurance for the 41 million Americans who now lack coverage, the researchers said."
"The study puts the administrative cost of the U.S. system at $294 billion per year, compared to about $9.4 billion in Canada. That translates to a per-person cost of $1,059 in the U.S. and $307 in Canada. A similar study, conducted in 1991, put per-capita costs in the U.S. at $450 and Canadian costs at one-third of that."
"Also, the study noted, private insurers spend large sums on marketing and underwriting, costs that the Canadian system doesn't have to bear."
---------------
That last note alone is amusing; and I wish there were some numbers attached to it. What percentage of your private health coverage costs goes towards paying for TV advertising to tell you how great your insurer's coverage is? What percentage of your private health care costs go towards paying marketers and lobbyists to convince congressmen, senators, and people like you that Canada's system is 'teh devil' that will bankrupt your country? There's some real irony there.
Canada's system isn't perfect by a longshot, and if you don't want the system and can come up with something better, I'm listening! Canada wants a better system than its got too. But while you figure out what that system is you'd be considerably further ahead with Canada's system than your own.
Any artist whose art can be mistaken for a biological weapon ought to be detained imho. What was so bad about paintings and sculptures of people and nature that they had to be completely abandoned by modern artists in favor of making mostly stuff that a scrap yard would turn down as too hideous.
Being vindictive to innocent people who have or like things that are complicated or blink is just plain silly.
You are aware, I'm sure, that most real biological weapons and bombs look entirely innocuous. You know, like that guy's briefcase over there. Or the shoe that kid is wearing. Or the sheaf of envelopes that woman is holding, or that thermos the janitor walked by with...
I'm not sure there is one correct piece of information in this post.
I readily concede the examples were more to underline the issues with CPI calculations than exact dollar values.
The assumption is that if steak gets more expensive, people will buy more hamburger. There is a debate on whether this method is proper
There are multiple issues with it, both for and against. If an epidemic of mad cow disease skyrockets the price of beef and people substitute salmon and pork tenderloin, then its a fair substition. The cost of living didn't really go up; the price of beef went nuts, and normal people just stopped buying it.
But the idea of substituting steak for hamburger is absurd. That represents making a sacrifice to ones standard of living in order to stay ahead of the rising cost of groceries, and it shouldn't be masked.
Secondly by tweaking whats in the basket from year to year, it becomes even harder to compare the numbers. If 10 years ago we're dining on steak and salmon, and this year we're dining on hamburgers and fish sticks, and 10 years from now we're gagging back beans and seaweed, and the CPI numbers are telling us things are just fine, then it isn't doing its job.
The price of energy was not taken out. It is still captured in the CPI. However, some people argued that the CPI less food and energy ("Core" CPI) was a better indicator, which I don't really agree with, but the fact is that the numbers are still published by BLS and the mainstream media simply ignores them.
When your wage increases are contractually linked to core-cpi and governments congratulate themselves on low inflation its more than a problem with 'mainstream media'. I realize the numbers are there, but if they aren't being used to make policy decisions because they are politically inconvenient, hiding them under the rug while using a cpi number that is at odds with reality is dishonest. That's not BLS' fault per se, but they should take ownership of it and shout from the rooftops, "hey! core-cpi doesn't reflect what the american's are actually experiencing at all right now, and only an idiot would use it to judge the state of the economy right now."
Also it wasn't recent, it was 1978.
Its only recently that it diverged from core-cpi badly. It didn't really matter that it was excluded when it was rising at the same rate.
BLS is aware of the shortcomings in quality adjustments for technology items, and it is an area of current research. However your example is not correct, the BLS analysts are knowledgeable enough to know that a quad 2GHz != 8 x 1GHz.. and furthermore the weighting that computers get in the overall CPI is small (0.5% for all IT goods/services in December 2006 CPI-W).
As for my example with hedonics, yes I know the BLS isn't that incompetent, but it is a fair example of what hedonics *is*. And pointing out that that computer weighting in the cpi is small is misleading. Hedonics is applied to more than just computers. TV's, Kitchen appliances, Home theatres, alarm clocks, power tools, cars, fishing rods, sports equipment, etc.
Worse the inverse of hedonics isn't applied. When the quality of something is lowered over time, we don't see that loss of quality reflected as a higher cost the same way we see the increase of quality reflected as a lower cost. Consider, for example, ikea furniture which is mostly plastic and particle board.
They are struggling to handle users that can't master the concept of a .zip file.
Because, presumably, you're role playing as a male character. And because it is just a 3D model. And because staring at some dude's ass shouldn't be a issue for anyone secure in their sexuality.
This isn't about insecurity. A guy reading playboy isn't insecure about his sexuality; he's indulging in it. He's not trying to prove he's heterosexual; he's merly being heterosexual. He's been given the choice between looking at a male or female character, he's choosing to look at a female one. Its just that simple.
Most players treat their avatars like the wooden dummies that ventriloquists carry around - it has its own name, and it has its own gender, and its may even have a bit its own personality. But the player is still there with their hand up their back controlling the puppet. Its an extension of themselves, and if the gender of the puppet doesn't match the gender of the ventriloquist, they'd be pretty taken aback if someone tried to 'pick up' their dummy. Mostly they'd wonder what kind of idiot tries to pick up the dummy in the first place, no matter how cute it is. They might not know what the player behind it looks like, but its not like they don't know its a dummy, or that the player isn't there.
What are you going on about? *Whatever* information the server uses to decide whether to update can be sent easily to the client, where the client can make its own decision, without sending information about the client to the server, beyond requesting the information.
Also, since they provide you with a way to turn it off...
Not really.
Sure its open source so you can modify it yourself. And sure its got a plugin system that you can use to break/disable the feature by having the plug-in confuse the software into thinking its already being updated.
That's like buying a car where the headlights can't be turned off, but claiming its not defective because installing a switch yourself isn't -that- hard, if it means that much to you, or you can just disconnect the battery...
Yes. The US has been lying about inflation for a few years now. When the price of steak skyrocketed, for example they took it out of the equation and substituted ground beef.
Recently they took out the cost of energy because it it went up huge; their explanation was that they didn't want it to 'distort' the numbers. (despite the fact that everyone in the country still has to buy gas for their cars and heat their homes so it -should- be reflected.)
Even worse, they have a fucked up system of computing negative inflation. If you bought a single core 1ghz computer 3 years ago and it cost $1000, then today, because you could get a 2ghz quad-core for $1000, you are getting $8000 worth of value; so in the index, the cost of computers has dropped by 75% over the last couple years... despite the fact that the price hasn't really dropped... its not like that 1ghz 1core computer is sitting at walmart for $125, even if you wanted it.
Similiarly if this years model of your car has had standard side airbags, and an improved emissions control system and costs $1000 more, well again inflation is negative, even though the car costs more, becuase they factor in the new features as 'increasing its value more than its cost'; so in some warped bizarro world the cost of buying a new car is deemed to have gone down.
Nice strawman.
My powerbook is running tons of software with autoupdate features.
Ok.
see this is a great thing and something that a user should have a good reason to turn it off.
You mean like sending needless private information to the parent company without permission or even disclosure?
Why would you wanna be using out of date software, and why the hell would you wanna risk missing a bugfix release that patches some major security flaw?
Well, that's really not the issue being debated here. But even so, if they are patching an issue with a module I don't use and the update contains the risk of creating an issue with a module I do use...what is the advantage of the upgrade exactly? Its not even break even.
I dont know about you, but my time is valuable, and I can't spend the free time I have weeding through RSS feeds for the blogs of all the software I use, let alone take the time to download and install it
And no one is stopping you. I'm not against the software having an autoupdate feature, and I'm not against you using it. So *again*, this is really not the issue being discussed.
The only issue I have is the that the auto update feature is being pushed on users who -don't- want it. Worse, the auto-update feature sends information the server doesn't need to know that they consider irrevant, and even an invasion of privacy.
Its already been stated multiple times that an autoupdate feature doesn't need to send any information to the server at all. It only needs to request the current version number. That's it.
If the end user wants to share statistical information, usage data, installed plugins, and what not else with the developer in order to help the developer tune the product, that's fine too, but it shouldn't be on by default, and only able to be turned off by using hacks or 3rd party plugins.