This isn't "the earth regulating itself". This is one of many local disruptions that make global warming so dangerous: some parts will get hotter, some colder, some wetter, and some drier.
Right now, it is still an open question whether there are global feedback mechanisms. If there are, they seem to be positive feedback, rather than negative feedback.
I have seen no evidence that the CDC is inventing epidemics to get at personal data for nefarious purposes; have you?
The facts are that (1) the next epidemic is inevitable and (2) contact tracing works. The CDC is doing exactly what it has to do, and it is doing it in the most sensitive manner possible, namely by leaving the data with the airlines. I see absolutely nothing suspicious about this, nor do I see much potential for abuse.
Just keep in mind: terrorism almost certainly won't kill you, but there is a good chance that the next big flu epidemic will if it can't be contained.
After the info-gathering has gone on long enough for people to get used to it,
Your airline already keeps this info. It's in their computers and on their backup tapes. If law enforcement or other agencies want it, they can get it. This just ensures that an agency as like the CDC can also get it and get it reliably and on short notice.
But then, if some government entity wants that info, it would be easy enough for them to find an "emergency" that would justify getting it.
Maybe they can get away with that a couple of times, no more. If they regularly request "emergency" info without an actual emergency, people will start to notice.
people are going to march out the same "nothing to hide = nothing to fear" crap about this, but in the end it's just more of the same: an attempt to monitor and control people well beyond what the constitution intended, with the goal of power hidden by the mask of "safety".
I agree that it's very bad for data to be sent to the government for data mining purposes: it open the door to blackmail, false accusations, and other statistical accidents and abuses of power.
But my point is: that's not what's happening here. This regulation mandates minimum data retention standards for the airlines, something almost all of them likely already exceed. The government can't go on fishing expeditions with the data because they don't receive it unless there is an actual emergency.
fair enough point, but in the case of a pandemic the outbreak (and subsequent contacting of "at risk" individuals) could take a month or more to show itself.
If you wait a month for contact tracing in a flu pandemic, I think need not bother anymore. But, in any case, the point is that you can set data deletion requirements in addition to data retention requirements. There are few data deletion requirements in the US right now for this kind of data, but it might make sense to create some, and they are enforceable.
They're not really stopping you from doing any of this (unless there is a disease wherever you want to go, which in that case you probably shouldn't go anyway), but now "they" know about it.
"They" don't know about it, since the information is kept by the airlines, not the CDC. If it is only available when there is a pandemic, then that is good.
But if you're not a terrorist (still don't know if they have a big readership on Slashdot) I don't really see the harm in telling the CDC where you're going so in case some flu pandemic breaks out where you just got back from they can notify you
Again, the airlines aren't telling the CDC, the airlines would simply be required to keep this information on file, which they are doing already anyway.
Sacrificing a little personal freedom for increased safety of the whole is worth it to me in THIS SITUATION.
Well, you're wrong on the facts, but let's assume you were right. Why is it bad for the government to have lots of personal information? Simple: they use it to blackmail people. No, that's not a tinfoil hat concern, it has a long tradition. "Vote our way, or we will leak information about your mistress/gambling habit/whatever".
You are missing the point, which is that the airline, not the CDC, is keeping the information. So, the story is misleading: the CDC does NOT want to track you.
And we don't have to guess whether this "exceeds" what airlines already keep because the information they want is right in the article. I don't know about you, but my airline has all that information on file already, plus dietary preferences and a lot of other information.
As for the time limit, there is no time limit at all right now anyway. I'm just saying that you can have a CDC-like requirement with a strict time limit if you wanted to.
It is not the CDC that "wants" your address, they want the airline to keep that information on file so that they can get it if they need it:
The regulations will require airlines to collect and maintain in an electronic database the following passenger information:
Almost all airlines keep that information already in some form (for marketing, frequent flyer programs, etc.), they just may be too disorganized to be able to respond to CDC requests. This would require them to be able to do that. I don't see a problem with that. This kind of mandate would even be compatible with a strict data retention and privacy standard that requires deletion of all customer data after, say, a couple of weeks.
The term "speaks out" has connotations, like revealing a dirty secret, which doesn't seem to be the case here. I think it would be prudent to choose one's headlines a little more carefully.
You should try this particular variation of an MS Windows-NT based OS out before you cut Windows down, wholesale.
You misunderstood my point. I didn't say "Windows should earn little profit because it sucks", I said "Windows should earn little profit because it is being sold in a mature market with many equivalent products". Among others, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris, for example, have had the same certifications and uptimes for years, plus lots more functionality.
Incidentally, C2 compliance just means that a product has a specific set of features, not whether the product is actually secure. It can even be argued that complying with C2 makes a product less secure overall, although it may make it easier for you to implement specific security policies.
Fortunately for banks, if the ATM equipment screws up and the customer can prove it (with receipts, etc), the banks have exposed themselves to lawsuits.
Having had my entire account emptied and overdrawn because the bank screwed up with security and I provably didn't, I can tell you: the bank doesn't expose themselves to lawsuits if they screw up with your money.
In real life, you are entirely at their mercy. You can forget about getting any compensation for the time, headaches, late fees, and other costs resulting from their mistake.
If you make yourself enough of a nuisance and jump through their hoops, you may get your money back and if you're really lucky, you may even get out with your credit rating intact.
Either way, they'll just eat the loss; they'll just raise their fees a little. Loss due to fraud is just part of the banking business.
The Mac Mini makes sense as a PVR, from its form factor and appearance. But, as someone who has been trying to use it for just that purpose, I have to say: they need to do something about performance, both of the hardware and of OS X itself. It's not just that the system needs MPEG hardware encoding/decoding, they also need to make OS X less of a resource hog (or ship with 1G of memory), need to make the screen rendering more efficient, and fix a lot of other performance issues. None of that matters much on a big Macintosh, but on these little machines, it is an issue.
As it is, I use my Mac Mini for DVD playback and as a jukebox; as a PVR, it's not all that usable in its current form.
Firefox lists the headlines for each of your RSS feeds, but you get no further story preview.
If you want that, use Sage: it gives you a summary on mouseover and an entire page of summaries when you select the feed (like Safari has added now as well).
I don't see a "debate" that is continuing. What I see is a multi-billion dollar ad campaign trying to discredit an operating system that is clearly successful, secure, and widely used.
And the motivation is simple: by free market principles, Windows is way too expensive: it's mature technology (in the sense of having been around a long time, not in the sense of working well), there ought to be competitors, and the profit on it should be nearly zero. Instead, Microsoft has managed to keep raking in large profits through monopolistic practices. Linux is the only competitor that has managed to break through Microsoft's monopolistic practices, so it is in Microsoft's crosshairs.
So, move along, there is no "debate" here, only FUD and peoeple from Rent-an-Expert.
Live updates themselves are a stupid and outdated concept. They come from an era of mainframe computing when people didn't have any better alternatives.
If you need to have (close to) 100% uptime, you need failover capability anyway, and in that case, you update one system while the other one keeps running.
However, in most cases, shutting down a system briefly for updates is OK--just about everybody does it. Just make sure to test your updates thoroughly before you install them.
But proving it's not possible is the problem. To some problems, there are no solutions substantially better than "try all possibilities", which is impossible in practice for most systems.
That's completely wrong. Proving correctness of software isn't hard; it's only hard if you do it retroactively and if you try to do it completely. In this case, all we care about is whether the signal can infect the machine, which is probably easy to prove not to be the case.
But whether anybody bothers to prove it makes no difference; if the software has the property that it's not possible, then it's not possible.
And, of course, the most likely attack is "programming" the papyrus readers, not the papyrus itself. Quiet suggestions as to how awesome life would be, this, this, and this, of only you'd do that, that, and that, which actually causes problems x, y, and z.
"Programming the papyrus reader" is known as "social engineering". That is a concern, and aliens are likely much better at it than we understand, but it's not something you have to worry about in the SETI software.
The States and the People are the ones who need to arm themselves to protect against "terrorists.
Nobody needs to arm themselves against terrorists at all--terrorism simply isn't a big problem compared to other preventable causes of death. Normal police work plus some sensible precautions in air travel would be sufficient.
Politicians are simply using terrorism for fearmongering, with the goal of getting more power.
The term "academic license" is usually taken to refer either to a lower priced commercial license for academic institutions, or a license of some proprietary piece of software that permits inspection and/or modification only for academic (mostly the same as non-commercial) purposes.
Using the term to refer collectively to MIT/BSD-style licenses is confusing and misleading; there is nothing intrinsically "academic" about those licenses.
Anybody who asserts that they can conduct an unbiased study that is paid for by a beneficiary of that study is simply fooling himself; trying to defend that is just making him even less credible.
There are lots of other problems with the study apart from its intrinsic bias. The selection of experimental subjects and the statement of business requirements both reflect a naive view of how these things work in practice in a real organization; selecting them in "the same way" is, in fact, not at all selecting them in the same way.
The only thing this study shows is that these people don't know what they are doing and that they can be bought.
Two of the companies that Microsoft has been accused of destroying are Novell and WordPerfect. Yet much of the blame for the demise of these two companies goes to their management that did not know how to properly market their products nor deal with a competitor such as Microsoft.
This charge is often made. And, yes, Novell screwed up, as did other companies that got steamrollered over by Microsoft. But Microsoft has screwed up many times as well, and big time. The difference is that when a company controls the operating system and has a monopolistic revenue stream, they can screw up again and again and still stay in business.
The latest screwup by Microsoft is Longhorn/Vista, where they have had to drop one feature after another and are still years late. Any other company would have gone bankrupt if they did this to their major projects, and any software professional responsible for such a project should be banned from the profession for life.
To people interested in an insider account of Microsoft, its management, and its screwups, I recommend "Barbarians led by Bill Gates".
The problem with ET signals is not viruses. It is impossible for SETI signals to purposely infect a terrestrial computer system--our systems are just too primitive for that--and no level of technical advancement on their part will fix that.
The real problem with ET signals is social engineering. That is, ETs constructing a message to us telling us to build something that we think is beneficial but that is actually harmful. Why would they do that? Maybe as a cosmic practical joke, who knows. Those scenarios have been explored at length in science fiction.
I think we agree on the facts of what physicists do and why they do it (they often get away with it). But I would argue that it is sloppiness and that it has been holding back physics for decades. That's a separate debate, though.
I doubt that's a good application. Gaming machines are not particularly fast compared to general purpose hardware by the time they are widely available. Generally, you are better off with a bunch of low-end machines you buy off the shelf.
If you're really on a budget, you buy the motherboards, CPUs, memory, and powersupplies separately and assemble them in a single big case.
The bug that lets you circumvent the hypervisor and trusted computing junk (and I'm sure there is one) is likely not to be found in the core designs of those components themselves. More likely, it's something silly in a hardware add-on, game, test facility, etc.
(Not that I think it's worth wasting any time and effort on finding it. Rather than trying to find the latest screw-up by Microsoft engineers, it would be far more productive to worry about improving Linux and free software on general purpose hardware.)
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't "the earth regulating itself". This is one of many local disruptions that make global warming so dangerous: some parts will get hotter, some colder, some wetter, and some drier.
Right now, it is still an open question whether there are global feedback mechanisms. If there are, they seem to be positive feedback, rather than negative feedback.
I have seen no evidence that the CDC is inventing epidemics to get at personal data for nefarious purposes; have you?
The facts are that (1) the next epidemic is inevitable and (2) contact tracing works. The CDC is doing exactly what it has to do, and it is doing it in the most sensitive manner possible, namely by leaving the data with the airlines. I see absolutely nothing suspicious about this, nor do I see much potential for abuse.
Just keep in mind: terrorism almost certainly won't kill you, but there is a good chance that the next big flu epidemic will if it can't be contained.
The way I read it was that it is pretty clear that there is lots of ice. The thing that is speculative is the presence of a liquid layer.
After the info-gathering has gone on long enough for people to get used to it,
Your airline already keeps this info. It's in their computers and on their backup tapes. If law enforcement or other agencies want it, they can get it. This just ensures that an agency as like the CDC can also get it and get it reliably and on short notice.
But then, if some government entity wants that info, it would be easy enough for them to find an "emergency" that would justify getting it.
Maybe they can get away with that a couple of times, no more. If they regularly request "emergency" info without an actual emergency, people will start to notice.
people are going to march out the same "nothing to hide = nothing to fear" crap about this, but in the end it's just more of the same: an attempt to monitor and control people well beyond what the constitution intended, with the goal of power hidden by the mask of "safety".
I agree that it's very bad for data to be sent to the government for data mining purposes: it open the door to blackmail, false accusations, and other statistical accidents and abuses of power.
But my point is: that's not what's happening here. This regulation mandates minimum data retention standards for the airlines, something almost all of them likely already exceed. The government can't go on fishing expeditions with the data because they don't receive it unless there is an actual emergency.
fair enough point, but in the case of a pandemic the outbreak (and subsequent contacting of "at risk" individuals) could take a month or more to show itself.
If you wait a month for contact tracing in a flu pandemic, I think need not bother anymore. But, in any case, the point is that you can set data deletion requirements in addition to data retention requirements. There are few data deletion requirements in the US right now for this kind of data, but it might make sense to create some, and they are enforceable.
They're not really stopping you from doing any of this (unless there is a disease wherever you want to go, which in that case you probably shouldn't go anyway), but now "they" know about it.
"They" don't know about it, since the information is kept by the airlines, not the CDC. If it is only available when there is a pandemic, then that is good.
But if you're not a terrorist (still don't know if they have a big readership on Slashdot) I don't really see the harm in telling the CDC where you're going so in case some flu pandemic breaks out where you just got back from they can notify you
Again, the airlines aren't telling the CDC, the airlines would simply be required to keep this information on file, which they are doing already anyway.
Sacrificing a little personal freedom for increased safety of the whole is worth it to me in THIS SITUATION.
Well, you're wrong on the facts, but let's assume you were right. Why is it bad for the government to have lots of personal information? Simple: they use it to blackmail people. No, that's not a tinfoil hat concern, it has a long tradition. "Vote our way, or we will leak information about your mistress/gambling habit/whatever".
You are missing the point, which is that the airline, not the CDC, is keeping the information. So, the story is misleading: the CDC does NOT want to track you.
And we don't have to guess whether this "exceeds" what airlines already keep because the information they want is right in the article. I don't know about you, but my airline has all that information on file already, plus dietary preferences and a lot of other information.
As for the time limit, there is no time limit at all right now anyway. I'm just saying that you can have a CDC-like requirement with a strict time limit if you wanted to.
Almost all airlines keep that information already in some form (for marketing, frequent flyer programs, etc.), they just may be too disorganized to be able to respond to CDC requests. This would require them to be able to do that. I don't see a problem with that. This kind of mandate would even be compatible with a strict data retention and privacy standard that requires deletion of all customer data after, say, a couple of weeks.
The term "speaks out" has connotations, like revealing a dirty secret, which doesn't seem to be the case here. I think it would be prudent to choose one's headlines a little more carefully.
You should try this particular variation of an MS Windows-NT based OS out before you cut Windows down, wholesale.
You misunderstood my point. I didn't say "Windows should earn little profit because it sucks", I said "Windows should earn little profit because it is being sold in a mature market with many equivalent products". Among others, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris, for example, have had the same certifications and uptimes for years, plus lots more functionality.
Incidentally, C2 compliance just means that a product has a specific set of features, not whether the product is actually secure. It can even be argued that complying with C2 makes a product less secure overall, although it may make it easier for you to implement specific security policies.
Fortunately for banks, if the ATM equipment screws up and the customer can prove it (with receipts, etc), the banks have exposed themselves to lawsuits.
Having had my entire account emptied and overdrawn because the bank screwed up with security and I provably didn't, I can tell you: the bank doesn't expose themselves to lawsuits if they screw up with your money.
In real life, you are entirely at their mercy. You can forget about getting any compensation for the time, headaches, late fees, and other costs resulting from their mistake.
If you make yourself enough of a nuisance and jump through their hoops, you may get your money back and if you're really lucky, you may even get out with your credit rating intact.
Either way, they'll just eat the loss; they'll just raise their fees a little. Loss due to fraud is just part of the banking business.
The Mac Mini makes sense as a PVR, from its form factor and appearance. But, as someone who has been trying to use it for just that purpose, I have to say: they need to do something about performance, both of the hardware and of OS X itself. It's not just that the system needs MPEG hardware encoding/decoding, they also need to make OS X less of a resource hog (or ship with 1G of memory), need to make the screen rendering more efficient, and fix a lot of other performance issues. None of that matters much on a big Macintosh, but on these little machines, it is an issue.
As it is, I use my Mac Mini for DVD playback and as a jukebox; as a PVR, it's not all that usable in its current form.
Firefox lists the headlines for each of your RSS feeds, but you get no further story preview.
If you want that, use Sage: it gives you a summary on mouseover and an entire page of summaries when you select the feed (like Safari has added now as well).
I don't see a "debate" that is continuing. What I see is a multi-billion dollar ad campaign trying to discredit an operating system that is clearly successful, secure, and widely used.
And the motivation is simple: by free market principles, Windows is way too expensive: it's mature technology (in the sense of having been around a long time, not in the sense of working well), there ought to be competitors, and the profit on it should be nearly zero. Instead, Microsoft has managed to keep raking in large profits through monopolistic practices. Linux is the only competitor that has managed to break through Microsoft's monopolistic practices, so it is in Microsoft's crosshairs.
So, move along, there is no "debate" here, only FUD and peoeple from Rent-an-Expert.
Live updates themselves are a stupid and outdated concept. They come from an era of mainframe computing when people didn't have any better alternatives.
If you need to have (close to) 100% uptime, you need failover capability anyway, and in that case, you update one system while the other one keeps running.
However, in most cases, shutting down a system briefly for updates is OK--just about everybody does it. Just make sure to test your updates thoroughly before you install them.
But proving it's not possible is the problem. To some problems, there are no solutions substantially better than "try all possibilities", which is impossible in practice for most systems.
That's completely wrong. Proving correctness of software isn't hard; it's only hard if you do it retroactively and if you try to do it completely. In this case, all we care about is whether the signal can infect the machine, which is probably easy to prove not to be the case.
But whether anybody bothers to prove it makes no difference; if the software has the property that it's not possible, then it's not possible.
And, of course, the most likely attack is "programming" the papyrus readers, not the papyrus itself. Quiet suggestions as to how awesome life would be, this, this, and this, of only you'd do that, that, and that, which actually causes problems x, y, and z.
"Programming the papyrus reader" is known as "social engineering". That is a concern, and aliens are likely much better at it than we understand, but it's not something you have to worry about in the SETI software.
The States and the People are the ones who need to arm themselves to protect against "terrorists.
Nobody needs to arm themselves against terrorists at all--terrorism simply isn't a big problem compared to other preventable causes of death. Normal police work plus some sensible precautions in air travel would be sufficient.
Politicians are simply using terrorism for fearmongering, with the goal of getting more power.
The term "academic license" is usually taken to refer either to a lower priced commercial license for academic institutions, or a license of some proprietary piece of software that permits inspection and/or modification only for academic (mostly the same as non-commercial) purposes.
Using the term to refer collectively to MIT/BSD-style licenses is confusing and misleading; there is nothing intrinsically "academic" about those licenses.
Anybody who asserts that they can conduct an unbiased study that is paid for by a beneficiary of that study is simply fooling himself; trying to defend that is just making him even less credible.
There are lots of other problems with the study apart from its intrinsic bias. The selection of experimental subjects and the statement of business requirements both reflect a naive view of how these things work in practice in a real organization; selecting them in "the same way" is, in fact, not at all selecting them in the same way.
The only thing this study shows is that these people don't know what they are doing and that they can be bought.
Two of the companies that Microsoft has been accused of destroying are Novell and WordPerfect. Yet much of the blame for the demise of these two companies goes to their management that did not know how to properly market their products nor deal with a competitor such as Microsoft.
This charge is often made. And, yes, Novell screwed up, as did other companies that got steamrollered over by Microsoft. But Microsoft has screwed up many times as well, and big time. The difference is that when a company controls the operating system and has a monopolistic revenue stream, they can screw up again and again and still stay in business.
The latest screwup by Microsoft is Longhorn/Vista, where they have had to drop one feature after another and are still years late. Any other company would have gone bankrupt if they did this to their major projects, and any software professional responsible for such a project should be banned from the profession for life.
To people interested in an insider account of Microsoft, its management, and its screwups, I recommend "Barbarians led by Bill Gates".
General purpose hardware isn't going to go away; any software or company that invests based on that ideas is simply foolish.
The problem with ET signals is not viruses. It is impossible for SETI signals to purposely infect a terrestrial computer system--our systems are just too primitive for that--and no level of technical advancement on their part will fix that.
The real problem with ET signals is social engineering. That is, ETs constructing a message to us telling us to build something that we think is beneficial but that is actually harmful. Why would they do that? Maybe as a cosmic practical joke, who knows. Those scenarios have been explored at length in science fiction.
I think we agree on the facts of what physicists do and why they do it (they often get away with it). But I would argue that it is sloppiness and that it has been holding back physics for decades. That's a separate debate, though.
I doubt that's a good application. Gaming machines are not particularly fast compared to general purpose hardware by the time they are widely available. Generally, you are better off with a bunch of low-end machines you buy off the shelf.
If you're really on a budget, you buy the motherboards, CPUs, memory, and powersupplies separately and assemble them in a single big case.
The bug that lets you circumvent the hypervisor and trusted computing junk (and I'm sure there is one) is likely not to be found in the core designs of those components themselves. More likely, it's something silly in a hardware add-on, game, test facility, etc.
(Not that I think it's worth wasting any time and effort on finding it. Rather than trying to find the latest screw-up by Microsoft engineers, it would be far more productive to worry about improving Linux and free software on general purpose hardware.)