The problem is that cooperation give these individuals the power to harm millions. No single person can put into production a car that kills thousands due to a design flaw, a company can though.
That happened not lately, with the exact company in the example given. THE FORD PINTO!!
Jesus fuck, have people forgotten about that already? The god damn thing was designed in such a way that it would explode if you hit it just right. The fix for the problem was something like $2 per unit (even taking into account inflation, that ain't a lot of money) and ford decided against implementing the fix.
A company that said "hey, our product kills people" and then decided that it was worth a small amount of money even if they knew hundreds of people would die.
Money. SURPRISE! Cooperation do unethical things when there's money to be made from it (or losses to be avoided)! News at 11.
Someone says to a cooperation "I have medical studies that prove your product to be dangerous". The company then has two options: A) Do the ethical thing and kill the product. B) Hide the report and make money.
Seriously, if this surprises anyone then they deserve to be shot. Shit like this is why we need more regulation of business when it comes to ethics. EVERY company acts unethically when there's money to be had, there's no competition for ethics and thus the free market fails here. I can't take my business to another company because NO OTHER COMPANIES ACT ETHICALLY.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that function is actually necessary. As long as it looks pretty it doesn't even have to turn on. People would buy a $500 brick if it was chrome plated and had the fucking apple logo on it.
Just because YOU can't do a job better doesn't mean that the person in charge is doing a good job. You probably couldn't design a car that manages to run for 10 seconds. That doesn't mean that the people that designed that lemon you have in your garage did a good job.
No, it's mostly because they can put a lot of money into an account for "restoration purposes" and then take for fucking ever to actually pay out on the claims. This way, they can spend a lot of time investing the money and doing other such financial trickery so that the money they finally do pay out will be interest accrued, etc.
Also they can put some amount of money into an account, lose it all, and then claim that despite making billions a year that they're completely broke and can't pay anything off.
Bullshit. They're a huge multinational entity. They're going to have their lawyers (the ones they already pay to have on staff) working for the next few years ensuring that they receive no blame for this. Sure obama has promised to make BP responsible, but it's not like he has some magical power to override the legal arguments that these lawyers will bring up. The president can only ignore the constitution if no one knows about it (i.e. wiretapping, etc) Something this public isn't going to be solved by an illegal assignation order.
Get it in an email and send it to any local group that helps people being discriminated against via use of the Americans with disabilities act. They'll be fired within a month or two or thrown in jail.
Mostly it just fails to take into account that when you buy "fiber service with up to XYZ Mbps" the company is actually going to give you less than a quarter of that because they sold you a line with "UP TO" speeds.
Actually people have done some studies and found that netflix starts to fuck with your DVDs if you order too many. They got sued over this a few years back in which they admitted that they were doing this, settled with lawyers (netflix customers got less than one week free subscription as payback), and changed their TOS to say something like "netflix send you DVDs when we want to, the X many out at a time plan is not actually legally binding."
They do things like mess with your queue. A movie that is ready to ship will appear as "long wait". Your DVDs will be shipped from a shipping center across the country so that it takes 2-3 days to get to you and back, etc.
Ending Saturday delivery will only help netflix screw its customers out of more money. One more reason I don't have a netflix subscription.
The AMA artificially restricts the number of new doctors? The AMA limits doctor salaries? Where the heck are these claims coming from? I see absolutely no actual citations. You mention one name without any link or way to verify that the person actually exists and you don't state WHERE he actually made these alleged claims. In a paper? In a conference? To a reporter? Sure I could google the guy's name but I'm not going to spend 3 hours trying to hunt down some paper he published 10 years ago in which he made some remarks that you happen to be misinterpreting.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, especially when you're making conspiracy-theory type claims, and you've provided almost none.
Actually, there is. It varies by state to state but there may be laws that prohibit you from putting flashing lights, changing displays, lit displays, etc. based on where you live.
It doesn't fucking matter what you've seen in the past, that's not the god damn issue here. The article doesn't say "people should get out of the way of PHDs, the article says that people should get out of the way of real scientists.
And the people that drive the million dollar car do have a greater right to be there (unfortunately, not a legal right). Not because of their PHD, not because of their funding, not be cause the car costs a million billion dollar, but because it's a million dollars of SCIENCE EQUIPMENT that will gather REAL DATA. Doesn't matter if it's driven by a PHD or not.
The issue is that every other dipshit amature is out there blocking the way with their car so that they can take a few pictures. Taking pictures doesn't help, a million dollars of fancy science equipment does.
I think the real issue here is that because most of the public doesn't know what "radar" or "air pressure" is they assume it's worthless and that scientists are all just acting high and mighty and spending lots of money on worthless shit. People, wake up, you aren't that guy with a PHD probably does know more about tornadoes than you do, even if you're too stupid to know what college is.
"any field *becomes* a "science" only after someone with no knowledge explores it enough to establish some information"
Right, and that's ALREADY BEEN DONE. If this were 50 years ago then you might have an argument, but now that it IS a science, people need to get the fuck out of the way so that the real scientists can do actual work. You only need enough morons with beer hats to get the field going, once it's going, you need to get them the fuck out of the way.
"We engineers don't have cubicles, we work in an open "bullpen" area"
That's actually an excellent solution. Your company won't attract anyone that's any good at their job and will thus be out of business inside of two years. Then you won't have anything to worry about.
"Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry. I'm not saying it's a solved problem, but it's a much, much easier one."
You clearly don't know how this actually works. You can't just go straight down to earth, you have to aim quite precisely to make sure that you don't completely burn up. You also have to not land in the middle of times square or in the middle of an incredibly dangerous part of the ocean. Hauling a container (which I guess you think is really easy to build) full of some minerals (probably quite heavy due to size of container and density of anything worth mining) in the middle of 40 foot waves is a suicide mission.
Of course, you still have to get this magic container up to the moon. The heavier it is, the more expensive it is. And as for "giving it a kick", well, you have to transport the boot up there too. Then you have to assemble, test, power, and use this boot. How do you expect to do that cheaply?
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE "NASA-funded scientists estimate from recent research that the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon’s interior could exceed the amount of water in the Great Lakes here on Earth. "
I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing. Transporting anything from the moon to the earth is so expensive that it likely isn't worth mining. And you have the initial cost of establishing a mining outpost on the moon which, although probably mostly robotic, would still require some amount of human intervention. Either way, it would require such a hideously large initial investment that it's not likely to happen any time in the future.
The problem is that printers that are rated for 1 million+ pages are rated to do so with a service contract. Various components WILL eventually break down WAY before the printer reaches its expected lifetime. Be it the fuser, the drum, various rollers, some random fucking gear, etc.
See, the plastic gears they use probably cost at least $1 per unit less than metal gears. That's millions of dollars a year in savings. In addition to that the service contract costs quite a bit per year. It's much more profitable for them to charge you $500 a year to replace a $0.20 gear every two years than it is to design the printer properly in the first place. Of course, they won't sell the cheap components (gears) to you without the contract to replace them. They'll sell you the expensive components (fuser, etc) but they'll cost you about $150-$400 depending on the particular model.
Also, these printers only save you money if you actually print a million pages over the time that you own the printer. That will take at least 10 years for a personal user to recoup and then only if they print like a motherfucker.
These printers and service contracts might make a lot of sense for a business, but in terms of personal printing (which is what the article is actually talking about) we're still stuck with shit printers. Apparently they now want to add ads to the personal printers.
Alright, we have a billion of these fucking open source 3d printers that are supposed to be able to replicate themselves, but not a single open source 2D printer. That's what we fucking need. These companies are realizing that everyone needs to have a printer for at the minimum occasional use. They sell shit printers and expensive, good printers. Either we buy their shit printers and they make money off of them or we buy their good printers and they make cockloads of money off of them.
I seriously don't see why after all these years we can't make an open source printer. Certainly, it can't be harder than a 3D printer.
"Is it unreasonable for somebody to want a court to investigate further, given the scale and scope of the damage?"
Yes, yes it is. Science is not some fucking magic thing that can predict natural disasters.
If the scientists withheld information that there was a big earthquake that was going to come soon then sure, that's pretty unethical, but that isn't the case here. Do you seriously think that these scientists would withhold information that indicated this earthquake was going to happen if they had said information?
"This kind of behavior is childish at best, but in my opinion borders on criminal."
You think that exposing a problem with software is "borderline criminal"? When a vulnerability like this gets released it will generally result in the creation of some kind of malware. You seem to think that the solution is simply to make it illegal to know about it.
I realize that you probably don't understand what it's like to manage a network of computers that actually has to work reliably without relying on the vendor to do all your work for you, but it's your job to disable vulnerable services and properly secure your network. It's not the vendor's job to make sure that your machines work, and it sure as hell isn't the general public's job to remain silent about the security holes in your system.
It's almost as if you don't think that the vulnerability will be used if it's not disclosed. It's like you think that this is the only guy that could ever fucking find such a bug. Seriously, if it's not publicly disclosed then the only people with access to it are going to be the people that will use it to completely fuck you sideways. I'd prefer it gets released and a bunch of script kiddies try to make it into some easy to prevent malware so it gets patched rather than leave it only in the hands of those that know how to use it to its full potential.
"And he expects them to drop everything just to deal with him?"
Of course not. He expects them to fix their software. There's a difference. It's not his fault there's a fucking bug. Microsoft doesn't have to deal with "him". They just have to deal with their software.
Slashdot Mirror
"On the one hand, hey, that was the contract."
Which fails to be a legal document when you die. The end.
The problem is that cooperation give these individuals the power to harm millions. No single person can put into production a car that kills thousands due to a design flaw, a company can though.
That happened not lately, with the exact company in the example given. THE FORD PINTO!!
Jesus fuck, have people forgotten about that already? The god damn thing was designed in such a way that it would explode if you hit it just right. The fix for the problem was something like $2 per unit (even taking into account inflation, that ain't a lot of money) and ford decided against implementing the fix.
A company that said "hey, our product kills people" and then decided that it was worth a small amount of money even if they knew hundreds of people would die.
Money. SURPRISE! Cooperation do unethical things when there's money to be made from it (or losses to be avoided)! News at 11.
Someone says to a cooperation "I have medical studies that prove your product to be dangerous". The company then has two options:
A) Do the ethical thing and kill the product.
B) Hide the report and make money.
Seriously, if this surprises anyone then they deserve to be shot. Shit like this is why we need more regulation of business when it comes to ethics. EVERY company acts unethically when there's money to be had, there's no competition for ethics and thus the free market fails here. I can't take my business to another company because NO OTHER COMPANIES ACT ETHICALLY.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that function is actually necessary. As long as it looks pretty it doesn't even have to turn on. People would buy a $500 brick if it was chrome plated and had the fucking apple logo on it.
Just because YOU can't do a job better doesn't mean that the person in charge is doing a good job. You probably couldn't design a car that manages to run for 10 seconds. That doesn't mean that the people that designed that lemon you have in your garage did a good job.
No, it's mostly because they can put a lot of money into an account for "restoration purposes" and then take for fucking ever to actually pay out on the claims. This way, they can spend a lot of time investing the money and doing other such financial trickery so that the money they finally do pay out will be interest accrued, etc.
Also they can put some amount of money into an account, lose it all, and then claim that despite making billions a year that they're completely broke and can't pay anything off.
Bullshit. They're a huge multinational entity. They're going to have their lawyers (the ones they already pay to have on staff) working for the next few years ensuring that they receive no blame for this. Sure obama has promised to make BP responsible, but it's not like he has some magical power to override the legal arguments that these lawyers will bring up. The president can only ignore the constitution if no one knows about it (i.e. wiretapping, etc) Something this public isn't going to be solved by an illegal assignation order.
Get it in an email and send it to any local group that helps people being discriminated against via use of the Americans with disabilities act. They'll be fired within a month or two or thrown in jail.
Mostly it just fails to take into account that when you buy "fiber service with up to XYZ Mbps" the company is actually going to give you less than a quarter of that because they sold you a line with "UP TO" speeds.
"It's meaningless hype, good for marketing."
That pretty much describes every single one of apple's products.
Actually people have done some studies and found that netflix starts to fuck with your DVDs if you order too many. They got sued over this a few years back in which they admitted that they were doing this, settled with lawyers (netflix customers got less than one week free subscription as payback), and changed their TOS to say something like "netflix send you DVDs when we want to, the X many out at a time plan is not actually legally binding."
They do things like mess with your queue. A movie that is ready to ship will appear as "long wait". Your DVDs will be shipped from a shipping center across the country so that it takes 2-3 days to get to you and back, etc.
Ending Saturday delivery will only help netflix screw its customers out of more money. One more reason I don't have a netflix subscription.
[Citation needed]
The AMA artificially restricts the number of new doctors? The AMA limits doctor salaries? Where the heck are these claims coming from? I see absolutely no actual citations. You mention one name without any link or way to verify that the person actually exists and you don't state WHERE he actually made these alleged claims. In a paper? In a conference? To a reporter? Sure I could google the guy's name but I'm not going to spend 3 hours trying to hunt down some paper he published 10 years ago in which he made some remarks that you happen to be misinterpreting.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, especially when you're making conspiracy-theory type claims, and you've provided almost none.
Actually, there is. It varies by state to state but there may be laws that prohibit you from putting flashing lights, changing displays, lit displays, etc. based on where you live.
It doesn't fucking matter what you've seen in the past, that's not the god damn issue here. The article doesn't say "people should get out of the way of PHDs, the article says that people should get out of the way of real scientists.
And the people that drive the million dollar car do have a greater right to be there (unfortunately, not a legal right). Not because of their PHD, not because of their funding, not be cause the car costs a million billion dollar, but because it's a million dollars of SCIENCE EQUIPMENT that will gather REAL DATA. Doesn't matter if it's driven by a PHD or not.
The issue is that every other dipshit amature is out there blocking the way with their car so that they can take a few pictures. Taking pictures doesn't help, a million dollars of fancy science equipment does.
I think the real issue here is that because most of the public doesn't know what "radar" or "air pressure" is they assume it's worthless and that scientists are all just acting high and mighty and spending lots of money on worthless shit. People, wake up, you aren't that guy with a PHD probably does know more about tornadoes than you do, even if you're too stupid to know what college is.
"any field *becomes* a "science" only after someone with no knowledge explores it enough to establish some information"
Right, and that's ALREADY BEEN DONE. If this were 50 years ago then you might have an argument, but now that it IS a science, people need to get the fuck out of the way so that the real scientists can do actual work. You only need enough morons with beer hats to get the field going, once it's going, you need to get them the fuck out of the way.
"We engineers don't have cubicles, we work in an open "bullpen" area"
That's actually an excellent solution. Your company won't attract anyone that's any good at their job and will thus be out of business inside of two years. Then you won't have anything to worry about.
Yeah, because web filters are always 100% accurate and there's no way to bypass them at all.
"no file downloads"
I think your entire staff is in need of firing because there's no way in hell you can actually view the web without downloading a file.
"Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry. I'm not saying it's a solved problem, but it's a much, much easier one."
You clearly don't know how this actually works. You can't just go straight down to earth, you have to aim quite precisely to make sure that you don't completely burn up. You also have to not land in the middle of times square or in the middle of an incredibly dangerous part of the ocean. Hauling a container (which I guess you think is really easy to build) full of some minerals (probably quite heavy due to size of container and density of anything worth mining) in the middle of 40 foot waves is a suicide mission.
Of course, you still have to get this magic container up to the moon. The heavier it is, the more expensive it is. And as for "giving it a kick", well, you have to transport the boot up there too. Then you have to assemble, test, power, and use this boot. How do you expect to do that cheaply?
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE
"NASA-funded scientists estimate from recent research that the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon’s interior could exceed the amount of water in the Great Lakes here on Earth. "
I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing. Transporting anything from the moon to the earth is so expensive that it likely isn't worth mining. And you have the initial cost of establishing a mining outpost on the moon which, although probably mostly robotic, would still require some amount of human intervention. Either way, it would require such a hideously large initial investment that it's not likely to happen any time in the future.
The problem is that printers that are rated for 1 million+ pages are rated to do so with a service contract. Various components WILL eventually break down WAY before the printer reaches its expected lifetime. Be it the fuser, the drum, various rollers, some random fucking gear, etc.
See, the plastic gears they use probably cost at least $1 per unit less than metal gears. That's millions of dollars a year in savings. In addition to that the service contract costs quite a bit per year. It's much more profitable for them to charge you $500 a year to replace a $0.20 gear every two years than it is to design the printer properly in the first place.
Of course, they won't sell the cheap components (gears) to you without the contract to replace them. They'll sell you the expensive components (fuser, etc) but they'll cost you about $150-$400 depending on the particular model.
Also, these printers only save you money if you actually print a million pages over the time that you own the printer. That will take at least 10 years for a personal user to recoup and then only if they print like a motherfucker.
These printers and service contracts might make a lot of sense for a business, but in terms of personal printing (which is what the article is actually talking about) we're still stuck with shit printers. Apparently they now want to add ads to the personal printers.
Alright, we have a billion of these fucking open source 3d printers that are supposed to be able to replicate themselves, but not a single open source 2D printer. That's what we fucking need. These companies are realizing that everyone needs to have a printer for at the minimum occasional use. They sell shit printers and expensive, good printers. Either we buy their shit printers and they make money off of them or we buy their good printers and they make cockloads of money off of them.
I seriously don't see why after all these years we can't make an open source printer. Certainly, it can't be harder than a 3D printer.
"Is it unreasonable for somebody to want a court to investigate further, given the scale and scope of the damage?"
Yes, yes it is. Science is not some fucking magic thing that can predict natural disasters.
If the scientists withheld information that there was a big earthquake that was going to come soon then sure, that's pretty unethical, but that isn't the case here. Do you seriously think that these scientists would withhold information that indicated this earthquake was going to happen if they had said information?
"This kind of behavior is childish at best, but in my opinion borders on criminal."
You think that exposing a problem with software is "borderline criminal"? When a vulnerability like this gets released it will generally result in the creation of some kind of malware. You seem to think that the solution is simply to make it illegal to know about it.
I realize that you probably don't understand what it's like to manage a network of computers that actually has to work reliably without relying on the vendor to do all your work for you, but it's your job to disable vulnerable services and properly secure your network. It's not the vendor's job to make sure that your machines work, and it sure as hell isn't the general public's job to remain silent about the security holes in your system.
It's almost as if you don't think that the vulnerability will be used if it's not disclosed. It's like you think that this is the only guy that could ever fucking find such a bug. Seriously, if it's not publicly disclosed then the only people with access to it are going to be the people that will use it to completely fuck you sideways. I'd prefer it gets released and a bunch of script kiddies try to make it into some easy to prevent malware so it gets patched rather than leave it only in the hands of those that know how to use it to its full potential.
"And he expects them to drop everything just to deal with him?"
Of course not. He expects them to fix their software. There's a difference. It's not his fault there's a fucking bug. Microsoft doesn't have to deal with "him". They just have to deal with their software.