Why are upright, bipedal robots always portrayed as the ultimate?
Two reasons spring to mind. First, it will make it easier to relate to robots if they resemble us in some way. Second, we've constructed our cities, tools, and other infrastructure to be optimal for the human body form. If we want robots that can interact with our world, they'd be well-served to have physical structures similar to ours.
1. The masses are asses. They could be using something else -- something worthwhile. Or, god forbid, nothing at all. Somehow, I don't recall feeling like 2006, before Twitter, was some sort of Dark Age.
2. Barely. Most people just collect followers and follow others at random, building huge lists of people just so they can brag about it or advertise more or whatever. The signal to noise ratio is atrocious. I realise that, with effort, one could selectively trim one's list down to get only useful information from "important" sources but since nobody actually does this, it really is just a bunch of chattering, inconsequential nonsense. You might as well just watch computers ARP at each other on a network.
3. Yeah, all the fun of texting combined with the reliability of anonymous hearsay.
4. This only worked because the Iranian government hadn't figured out how to shut it down. This is the case with any new technology. It will not be the case for Twitter within a year. And the information coming out of Twitter was of dubious value, despite the hype. "Things are really going bad," that sort of stuff. Highly informative, that.
5. No, it provides an understanding of how people use Twitter. It reflects absolutely nothing on how societies function. It's completely self-contained and insular.
6. So is scribbling on the wall with crayons but we usually stop children when we catch them doing that.
If the advertisers are paying for X number of impressions, and you have absolutely zero intention of buying whatever they're selling, then disabling the ads for yourself means that many more impressions are available to people who might buy them. Slashdot's still getting the ad revenue and the advertiser might make a sale or two.
Right, and I will happily set up BIND, as will many others on slashdot. We know how to do this. We know why we should do this.
But the vast masses have NO IDEA what dns is, why it matters, or anything else. All they know is that yesterday, if they mistyped an address, they got something like "Page Cannot Be Displayed", but today, that same error gives them some weirdo site. How am I going to explain this to my mother, or other people who call me about it? What solution will I give them? "Oh, no problem, set up a Linux machine and configure BIND." Yeah, right. Maybe offer to do it for them? Not happening.
DNS hijacking doesn't affect you and I and the rest of the geeks who understand a) what's going on and b) what to do about it. It does affect the vast majority, though, and those are the people about whom you need to worry -- if not for altruistic reasons, then because every degredation of standards invariably screws up the internet that much more for the average user, and makes them that much more powerless, and gives that much more control to corporate jackasses. Ultimately it will affect you, even if you personally find a way around it.
It's not at all stupid. The government is quite pleased when you break the speed limit, because it's probably not going to hurt anything, but they get to ticket you and make you pay them. There's a reason that most speed limits are set well below the agreed-upon 85th percentile. The speed limit law is doing exactly what it was intended to do, which is the same thing as many other traffic laws, and virtually every non-moving violation: Generate revenue for the state.
Because the "cloud" is a platform that can solve a very narrow scope of problmes, yet companies seem to want to put everything under the sun there just because they can. Most companies do not have a need for instant, on-demand ramp-up of computer power.
So if I wore bifocals, I'd just adjust my gaze slightly up or down depending on where I'm looking. I imagine that would become pretty natural after only a very short time using them.
Now with these things, I'd have to constantly reach up to my face and adjust a little lever -- all day, every day.
Right, you have a problem with Windows because yet another installer (which you downloaded from a completely unknown source off the web) stuffed up the registry, and needs its own particular dll and there was no way to tell that beforehand. Well, no problem! Just figure out which dll it needs, search the web, download and install it (hope it's clean!), then edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\Current and change value 0x762A63 to (obviously!) 0x77H4B45.
apparently our DNA is close enough to some primates that it IS possible to have offspring with them, similar to how Lions and Tigers can have offspring (of course most animal hybrids are usually sterile), but nobody's ever tried it for a plethora of reasons
. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.
In what way is Microsoft Office any better? It has trouble opening its own documents sometimes -- especially if, god forbid, the document was produced on an earlier version of Office. And how fun was it when 2007 was released and we all kept getting.docx and.xlsx with no way of opening them until Microsoft grudgingly released some plugin for earlier versions, which barely worked? In my experience, Open Office is actually better at reading most of Microsoft's formats than Microsoft itself is half the time.
Out of curiosity. How do (or will) you handle writing lengthy documents at work in cubicle-land? Many times, workplace environments are noisy and you'll find yourself frequently interrupted by emails, phone calls, and co-workers with questions and whatnot.
So glad you asked. When I started this job, it was a very small company, and the noise from my coworkers drove me nuts. So, I moved into the kitchen. Dead serious. Got a chair and a coffee table for my feet, and sat there with my laptop on my lap, and a phone next to me on a little side table. Sounds weird because people would always be shuffling in and out of the kitchen, but I preferred their brief sixty-second interruptions to a nonstop stream of noise from the actual office area. Plus it meant that I was highly visible to everyone in the company regardless of department or position, so I became sort of the gatekeeper for all secrets, gossip, and suchlike.
After a while the company grew and our department got shuffled to another building. They found me a corner area far away from everyone, where I could blast my music the whole time and drown out any ambient noise. (I can background oontz-oontz, even if there are vocals. Don't ask me how that works. If I'm streaming the music and the DJ starts babbling, though, it's game over for me.)
Then we moved again. The new building had two floors -- one for sales and marketing, the second floor for support, dev, and executives.. and a third, windowless, finished top floor that nobody wanted. So they hauled a desk up there and that was my office. It was glorious especially with the candle sconces I put up. Sit up there by myself all day, and not have to listen to other idiots chattering.
Unfortuantely, we moved YET AGAIN, recently, and the new place really is cubeland. They put me in a cube as far as possible from anyone, but I can still hear them if I turn off the music -- so I keep it on, and loud, all the time.
As for the coworker drop-in and such, that's never been a big issue for me. If someone is stopping by my desk, or phoning me, then they actually want to discuss something with me and I can turn my attention to that. My problem is when there is background chatter that doesn't actually require my attention, but my brain sits there processing what's being said, instead of letting me focus on the thing that DOES require my focus.
Man, do I miss my little attic area.
Anyway:
It's understandable different people have different work habits but which is the worst solution? Sending off your paper to a validation service which archives without your consent or doing the work in a monitored environment such as a classroom?
Neither one is a good solution. If you make someone like me write in the classroom, I will produce drivel that doesn't come anywhere close to what I could have done, and I am probably not alone in this. I don't see how it's fair that the quality of my work, and thus my grades, should suffer just because the instructor views us all as potential plagarists. Turnitin could be a solution if handled properly, but it isn't.
A better solution would be to stop treating everyone as though they must be cheating somehow. An instructor in a reasonably-sized classroom should be able to get a general feel for how well a given student can write, and be suspicious if a paper comes in that is markedly different from that student's tone, style, or general quality. I realise that's not realistic for all settings and class sizes, but I'm just not convinced we need a one-size-fits-all solution that hurts everybody in one way or another, just to weed out a few troublemakers.
Except that not everyone can work well that way. I loathed writing in class for many reasons.
First, I find it extremely difficult to write with a pen and paper. It's cumbersome to me, and my handwriting isn't all that great. It'd difficult to edit, especially if I decide this paragraph would be better suited to the first page instead of the third. I realise many campuses have computers and laptops available to students but most do not.
Second, creativity, which is required even for writing about a mundane topic if one wishes to have a decent paper, cannot simply be turned on and off at will. Sitting at an uncomfortable desk in a harshly-lit classroom surrounded by jerkwads does nothing to foster my ability to produce meaningful writing. I'll handle it much better at the location and time of my choosing.
Then there's always the loud-mouthed idiots who feel the need to talk during the in-class writing process, usually to ask a question, and then there's some back-and-forth between the instructor and the student. I absolutely cannot abide listening to people speak while I am trying to write. Maybe it's just me, and some quirk of the way my brain is wired, but hearing someone speak in a language I understand completely derails anything I was trying to write.
Finally, not everyone writes with drafts and revisions. When I'm trying to write something, I almost never go back and revise it -- I may make edits as I'm writing, but by and large, the final product will be the one that was completed the first time. Instructors who forced us to turn in "first drafts" and "rough drafts" along with our final papers were always maddening to me, though my solution was to simply write the paper, then go back and mess it up a few times and call those my earlier revisions. No one was ever the wiser and my papers turned out fine. Why force students to go through such a tedious process that is unnecessary for many of them?
So why would we expect to meet them. Hell, even if they care about meeting aliens too the aliens they care about are probably the ones who already inhabit similar regions.
In that sort of "purely computational" form of existence, it seems to me that ideas and information would be just about the only thing such a society would care about. They'd have essentially no use for anything else. So why wouldn't such a society want to contact other societies and get a whole new world of literature, art, music, and so on? Seems to me like a "computer society" would go out of their way to seek out other civilisations just so they could exchange ideas. Maybe they'd also want to seek societies that are radically different from their own -- like ours -- so as to get the most unique stuff they can.
All purely speculative, of course, but I don't think it's at all safe to assume that just because a society may be absurdly more advanced than we are, or shed their physicality entirely, would then becoming completely closed-off.
After all we may study chimps but we don't go out of our way to show up in the middle of nowhere to say hello.
Actually, we have tried to communicate with chimps, at least a little. The main reason we don't bother is because they don't really have a civilisation. You can bet that if they did, even if we considered it ridiculously primitive, we'd want to learn all we could about their art and music and literature and such -- even if none of it was of particular use or benefit to humans. I think that's just the way we are, and who is to say an alien life form wouldn't have that sense of curiosity as well?
In the history of recorded music there has always been an expectation that once you purchase it, it's yours to enjoy for as long as the media itself is capable of playing it. Your wax cylinder might not have lasted long but the shopkeep wasn't going to come rip it out of your hands whenever he felt like it. People listened to their records, 8 tracks, cassettes, and CDs until they fell apart, melted, cracked, or whatever -- if they ever did. And never has it been a consumer concern that someone's just going to take these things away.
Now the average yob, who knows nothing about "DRM" or "RIAA" or any of the rest, is somehow supposed to just know that the deal that's been in effect for the past hundred or so years has some new set of rules -- without being told? While, in fact, the companies peddling the wares are doing their best to perpetuate the myth that the music WILL be accessible for a lifetime like every other music purchase he's made?
No, I believe it is illegal, and likely falls into the category of consumer fraud.
I think a huge portion of the problem also comes from organisations demanding certificates where, honestly, none are needed. There are millions of sites out there where security is not even a passing issue, but for some reason they have certs, probably due to some idiotic managerial decision made years ago. And years later, everyone's stopped caring, so the site continues to have an invalid cert.
The whole thing is rather stupid. The right tool for the right job, people!
Your answers are coming off as really, really callous. Strictly speaking, you are probably right -- a rat is not worth as much as a human from a purely objective ethical or moral standpoint (though I suspect there are some who would debate this, and the discussion could get interesting).
But even if you're right, that does not mean we should be completely carefree about inflicting harm against creatures that can feel pain or fear or both, merely because they're not human. Tossing off one-word yes/no responses to that guy's questions makes it sound like there is nothing further to discuss, when in fact the issue of animal testing is a hotly contested one and not so easily answered.
2) The annual pwn2own competition, among others, shows that Linux and Windows are similarly secure and OSX is much less secure. OSX goes down first every year, while Windows and Linux both last until later days of the competition when more direct access to the systems is granted to the contestants.
Second, pwn2own shows what can happen if someone specifically targets your machine. No system is unbreakable to a truly determined and resourceful attacker, and nobody claims Linux is magically untouchable to such a concerted effort.
But that kind of targetted attack is not really what people care about when talking about general desktop security, is it? Nobody is targetting your mother's Windows machine, specifically. Her machine gets infected because trojans, viruses, and other malware is absurdly easy to pick up on the Windows platform just by going about her day to day work.
The thousands of exploits and vectors documented in Windows are of far more consequence to the average user than a focussed attack by a dedicated hacker deliberately trying to get into that specific machine. pwn2own demonstrates the latter threat, which is of no real concern to most users. It says nothing about the former threat, by far the more dangerous.
A Windows machine is more likely to be compromised, but that's because of market share.
This is such a tired argument. There are millions of LAMP stacks out there sitting on fat pipes. You think hackers and spammers wouldn't love to get their hands on those? The ones under my control get hammered all day, every day.
"Market Share" has nothing to do with the primary vector I notice plagues users either: Getting new apps. In any modern "desktop" disto, you get software out of a respository, which has been examined, vetted, and verified. If something's wrong with the package it won't get into the repo, and if it does, someone's going to notice quickly. It's not 100% foolproof but it's pretty damned great.
But Windows users don't have that option. Instead they scour the web looking for software which might do what they want, sift through the crippled versions, the trial versions, etc, and download a compeltely unknown binary from an unknown source, and run it. BIG SURPRISE, many of these come bundled with little extras -- trojans, adware, toolbars, and other party favors. Next thing you know the hapless Windows user is calling you to complain about how slow their computer is...
This is not a marketshare issue, it is one of many fundamental differences in the approach and structure of Windows versus Linux. If some genie made it such that Ubuntu had 90% marketshare tomorrow, that 90% of users would still be using Synaptic, and the 10% Windows users would still be downloading random executables from the web.
1) This vulnerability exists on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
As far as I can tell it exists on any platform where Flash is installed. It's not really an OS problem (though this is debatable, I guess), but an application problem. Though, the Zealot in me just has to point out that this is what happens when you deal with closed software. Now we're all waiting around twiddling our thumbs hoping Adobe will get off their butts and do something about this, because nobody else can.
it doesn't fill up with crap because crap writers don't target Linux (yet).
It also doesn't fill with crap because the expected way to get software is from the repositories, which are vetted and verified. A normal user would only have to get stuff from a third party under rather specific, special circumstances.
Contrast that with Windows where it is completely normal and expected to download random, untrusted, and often closed binaries from the web and run them. Big surprise, tons of them are bundled with crap you don't want or need which quickly bog down the OS.
Let's not forget the stupidity that is the Windows registry. Is anyone surprised that thing gets bloated and broken within a short period of time and drags the whole system down with it?
First, users don't know what certificates are, or why it matters. That should be pretty obvious.
The situation isn't helped by the fact that the overwhelming majority of invalid certs, in my experience, are just from random sites which you find with a Google search, and those sites for some reason have https instead of http as their search result. You click, and oh shock, the administrator hasn't updated his cert in ages, because nobody cares. After endless warnings about this, even I have stopped caring. It's almost a Pavlovian conditioning to see that warning and say "Yeah, whatever."
It's even worse now. Back in the day, you could dismiss these mostly spurious warnings with one click. These days, Firefox makes you go through an utterly obnoxious process of acknowledging the warning, then manually adding the certificate, then approving it. All because I needed to see some forum where people were discussing some problem I needed to solve. I am so tired of having to go through this that I just sigh and back away from the site and try to find another one that won't make me do this. I am not shocked that users just click whatever it takes to make the warnings go away.
My parents took me and some friends to Six Flags on my birthday and we rode roller coasters and ate junk food and blasted each other with water cannons and laughed ourselves silly. But if only there had been a Microsoft Store in my day...
Clearly I was born two decades too early. I feel gypped. Today's kids have no idea how lucky they are.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with anything. The world really does not revolve around Apple and Steve Jobs' quirks, and despite the (mostly self-generated) media circus surrounding Jobs' advertisements -- sorry, I mean "keynotes" -- his presentation style is not all that influental. I assure you, the phrase "one more thing..." has been used by millions of people before Jobs, and will be used by millions after.
This is akin to saying "I was at a meeting last week and the presenter was wearing a black turtleneck. Is it just me or was he totally ripping off Jobs' style?"
I guess people are annoyed that we haven't done much that's really revolutionary, or that has affected the way society functions, or affected the life of the average person, in the past forty years. Virtually everything we have now, we had forty years ago. Sure, it's advanced, and some of that is cool, but it's basically the same drek.
If you were to go back in time to the 60s and talk to someone, I think he'd be pretty disappointed about the future you'd tell him. He may marvel at your cellphone, but really, he has a phone too. You can carry yours around with you, and he can't, but in the scheme of things, it's not that big a deal.
You have computers. He's heard of those, and he logically expected that they'd get better and cheaper, just like cars did in his lifetime, as the technology improves. I don't think he'd be impressed withe the fact that you can "tweet" about what you had at the deli. In fact, I suspect he'd probably think that's pretty stupid.:P
You have a digital camera. Fine, that's cool and all, but it's really not that much different from the camera he has. Functionally speaking, for the average yob, the only real distinction is that you don't have to jog down to the drug store to get your pictures developed, and you know what the photo will look like immediately after snapping it. Cool, but nothing really earth-shattering.
You've got an mp3 player. He's got records. But he's seen his college buddies duplicate records on reel-to-reel tapes, so he's aware that can be done and, again, if he's a clever chap, he's probably already reasoned that process will get simpler as time goes on. The fact that it has isn't all that impressive. He may possibly question the usefulness of isolating yourself from your fellow man everywhere you go, by having headphones on at all times.
He's going to want to know: Where are the moon colonies and space hotels? What, you mean you guys sat on your butts for forty years after we got to the moon? What about the robots that will do most of the work society requires, leaving humans to enjoy leisure? You don't have those either? Well, those fancy fast computers must save you lots of time so I guess you don't have to work as much as we do in the 60s. What, you work just as much? More sometimes? Are the computers at least smart, like the ones on Star Trek, thinking about ways to solve our problems? No? So, let me get this straight: No robots, no flying cars, no moon colonies, you all still work like dogs, and all you've really done is make the stuff we already have slightly cooler. Oh, and cars are safer. That's not a lot to show for forty years!
I guess the Web, considered as a whole, is pretty damned great, and the access to staggering amounts of information is amazing. He'd probably consider that a great thing, assuming you could get the concept across to him.
You also force anyone who thinks they need to counter them to spend resources on developing and deploying the countermeasures.
That is such Cold War-era reasoning, and other than a few hardline Reagan-worshipping conservatives, there is no consensus as to whether the "outspend your enemy" concept had anything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that it was about to collapse on its own due to a variety of other factors, not the least of which was pure corruption at the top levels of government.
We aren't fighting that kind of war again, and likely never will. Wars these days are going to be against barely-defined, ragtag groups of loosely-associated factions (e.g., the current Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns) who certainly are not worried about economics or countering fancy new military gear. They've been successfully harassing our highly-financed troops for years using low-tech guerilla tactics.
The other possibility of war is against another superpower, but no one wants to go there because no one wants to risk a nuclear exchange. Anyway, Russia's unlikely to ever seriously bother us, and if China wants shut down the US they could probably do it without firing a single shot, just by pulling back all investments they have.
Really, what do we need F22s for anyway? Against whom do you think they'd be useful?
I do agree that building them so you never have to use them makes a certain amount of sense, much like learning martial arts, or stocking nuclear weapons. But even without F22s the US could clean the chronometers of damn near anyone. We don't need them in order to demonstrate our military might.
What I'd really like to understand (I always ask this and I've never gotten an answer) is why some people are so for it.
Off the top of my head, one major reason is that it's clean. No more coal-fired plants belching thousands of tons of crap into the air. Even leaving aside the global-warming aspect, I shouldn't need to spell out why less pollution is a good thing. That, alone, is enough for me to support it.
It's sustainable. Breeder reactors won't run out of fuel for thousands of years, and the price of the radioactive materials is unlikely to fluctuate all that much. No more worrying about if the cost to heat my home in the winter is going to skyrocket because oil prices are so high.
It allows greater independence. If you're powering most of your country with nuclear power, then a bunch of squabbling idiots in the Middle East, artificially raising and lowering the price and availability of oil, just doesn't matter very much. It also means we keep more money circulating in our own economy instead of constantly sending it to oil shieks.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are upright, bipedal robots always portrayed as the ultimate?
Two reasons spring to mind. First, it will make it easier to relate to robots if they resemble us in some way. Second, we've constructed our cities, tools, and other infrastructure to be optimal for the human body form. If we want robots that can interact with our world, they'd be well-served to have physical structures similar to ours.
1. The masses are asses. They could be using something else -- something worthwhile. Or, god forbid, nothing at all. Somehow, I don't recall feeling like 2006, before Twitter, was some sort of Dark Age.
2. Barely. Most people just collect followers and follow others at random, building huge lists of people just so they can brag about it or advertise more or whatever. The signal to noise ratio is atrocious. I realise that, with effort, one could selectively trim one's list down to get only useful information from "important" sources but since nobody actually does this, it really is just a bunch of chattering, inconsequential nonsense. You might as well just watch computers ARP at each other on a network.
3. Yeah, all the fun of texting combined with the reliability of anonymous hearsay.
4. This only worked because the Iranian government hadn't figured out how to shut it down. This is the case with any new technology. It will not be the case for Twitter within a year. And the information coming out of Twitter was of dubious value, despite the hype. "Things are really going bad," that sort of stuff. Highly informative, that.
5. No, it provides an understanding of how people use Twitter. It reflects absolutely nothing on how societies function. It's completely self-contained and insular.
6. So is scribbling on the wall with crayons but we usually stop children when we catch them doing that.
If the advertisers are paying for X number of impressions, and you have absolutely zero intention of buying whatever they're selling, then disabling the ads for yourself means that many more impressions are available to people who might buy them. Slashdot's still getting the ad revenue and the advertiser might make a sale or two.
Right, and I will happily set up BIND, as will many others on slashdot. We know how to do this. We know why we should do this.
But the vast masses have NO IDEA what dns is, why it matters, or anything else. All they know is that yesterday, if they mistyped an address, they got something like "Page Cannot Be Displayed", but today, that same error gives them some weirdo site. How am I going to explain this to my mother, or other people who call me about it? What solution will I give them? "Oh, no problem, set up a Linux machine and configure BIND." Yeah, right. Maybe offer to do it for them? Not happening.
DNS hijacking doesn't affect you and I and the rest of the geeks who understand a) what's going on and b) what to do about it. It does affect the vast majority, though, and those are the people about whom you need to worry -- if not for altruistic reasons, then because every degredation of standards invariably screws up the internet that much more for the average user, and makes them that much more powerless, and gives that much more control to corporate jackasses. Ultimately it will affect you, even if you personally find a way around it.
It's not at all stupid. The government is quite pleased when you break the speed limit, because it's probably not going to hurt anything, but they get to ticket you and make you pay them. There's a reason that most speed limits are set well below the agreed-upon 85th percentile. The speed limit law is doing exactly what it was intended to do, which is the same thing as many other traffic laws, and virtually every non-moving violation: Generate revenue for the state.
Because the "cloud" is a platform that can solve a very narrow scope of problmes, yet companies seem to want to put everything under the sun there just because they can. Most companies do not have a need for instant, on-demand ramp-up of computer power.
So if I wore bifocals, I'd just adjust my gaze slightly up or down depending on where I'm looking. I imagine that would become pretty natural after only a very short time using them.
Now with these things, I'd have to constantly reach up to my face and adjust a little lever -- all day, every day.
That seems absurd.
Right, you have a problem with Windows because yet another installer (which you downloaded from a completely unknown source off the web) stuffed up the registry, and needs its own particular dll and there was no way to tell that beforehand. Well, no problem! Just figure out which dll it needs, search the web, download and install it (hope it's clean!), then edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\Current and change value 0x762A63 to (obviously!) 0x77H4B45.
It's easy! Windows: Ready for the desktop!
apparently our DNA is close enough to some primates that it IS possible to have offspring with them, similar to how Lions and Tigers can have offspring (of course most animal hybrids are usually sterile), but nobody's ever tried it for a plethora of reasons
It has been tried. Weird but evidently true.
Under which of those two categories do tidal forces fall?
. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.
.docx and .xlsx with no way of opening them until Microsoft grudgingly released some plugin for earlier versions, which barely worked? In my experience, Open Office is actually better at reading most of Microsoft's formats than Microsoft itself is half the time.
In what way is Microsoft Office any better? It has trouble opening its own documents sometimes -- especially if, god forbid, the document was produced on an earlier version of Office. And how fun was it when 2007 was released and we all kept getting
Out of curiosity. How do (or will) you handle writing lengthy documents at work in cubicle-land? Many times, workplace environments are noisy and you'll find yourself frequently interrupted by emails, phone calls, and co-workers with questions and whatnot.
So glad you asked. When I started this job, it was a very small company, and the noise from my coworkers drove me nuts. So, I moved into the kitchen. Dead serious. Got a chair and a coffee table for my feet, and sat there with my laptop on my lap, and a phone next to me on a little side table. Sounds weird because people would always be shuffling in and out of the kitchen, but I preferred their brief sixty-second interruptions to a nonstop stream of noise from the actual office area. Plus it meant that I was highly visible to everyone in the company regardless of department or position, so I became sort of the gatekeeper for all secrets, gossip, and suchlike.
After a while the company grew and our department got shuffled to another building. They found me a corner area far away from everyone, where I could blast my music the whole time and drown out any ambient noise. (I can background oontz-oontz, even if there are vocals. Don't ask me how that works. If I'm streaming the music and the DJ starts babbling, though, it's game over for me.)
Then we moved again. The new building had two floors -- one for sales and marketing, the second floor for support, dev, and executives.. and a third, windowless, finished top floor that nobody wanted. So they hauled a desk up there and that was my office. It was glorious especially with the candle sconces I put up. Sit up there by myself all day, and not have to listen to other idiots chattering.
Unfortuantely, we moved YET AGAIN, recently, and the new place really is cubeland. They put me in a cube as far as possible from anyone, but I can still hear them if I turn off the music -- so I keep it on, and loud, all the time.
As for the coworker drop-in and such, that's never been a big issue for me. If someone is stopping by my desk, or phoning me, then they actually want to discuss something with me and I can turn my attention to that. My problem is when there is background chatter that doesn't actually require my attention, but my brain sits there processing what's being said, instead of letting me focus on the thing that DOES require my focus.
Man, do I miss my little attic area.
Anyway:
It's understandable different people have different work habits but which is the worst solution? Sending off your paper to a validation service which archives without your consent or doing the work in a monitored environment such as a classroom?
Neither one is a good solution. If you make someone like me write in the classroom, I will produce drivel that doesn't come anywhere close to what I could have done, and I am probably not alone in this. I don't see how it's fair that the quality of my work, and thus my grades, should suffer just because the instructor views us all as potential plagarists. Turnitin could be a solution if handled properly, but it isn't.
A better solution would be to stop treating everyone as though they must be cheating somehow. An instructor in a reasonably-sized classroom should be able to get a general feel for how well a given student can write, and be suspicious if a paper comes in that is markedly different from that student's tone, style, or general quality. I realise that's not realistic for all settings and class sizes, but I'm just not convinced we need a one-size-fits-all solution that hurts everybody in one way or another, just to weed out a few troublemakers.
Except that not everyone can work well that way. I loathed writing in class for many reasons.
First, I find it extremely difficult to write with a pen and paper. It's cumbersome to me, and my handwriting isn't all that great. It'd difficult to edit, especially if I decide this paragraph would be better suited to the first page instead of the third. I realise many campuses have computers and laptops available to students but most do not.
Second, creativity, which is required even for writing about a mundane topic if one wishes to have a decent paper, cannot simply be turned on and off at will. Sitting at an uncomfortable desk in a harshly-lit classroom surrounded by jerkwads does nothing to foster my ability to produce meaningful writing. I'll handle it much better at the location and time of my choosing.
Then there's always the loud-mouthed idiots who feel the need to talk during the in-class writing process, usually to ask a question, and then there's some back-and-forth between the instructor and the student. I absolutely cannot abide listening to people speak while I am trying to write. Maybe it's just me, and some quirk of the way my brain is wired, but hearing someone speak in a language I understand completely derails anything I was trying to write.
Finally, not everyone writes with drafts and revisions. When I'm trying to write something, I almost never go back and revise it -- I may make edits as I'm writing, but by and large, the final product will be the one that was completed the first time. Instructors who forced us to turn in "first drafts" and "rough drafts" along with our final papers were always maddening to me, though my solution was to simply write the paper, then go back and mess it up a few times and call those my earlier revisions. No one was ever the wiser and my papers turned out fine. Why force students to go through such a tedious process that is unnecessary for many of them?
So why would we expect to meet them. Hell, even if they care about meeting aliens too the aliens they care about are probably the ones who already inhabit similar regions.
In that sort of "purely computational" form of existence, it seems to me that ideas and information would be just about the only thing such a society would care about. They'd have essentially no use for anything else. So why wouldn't such a society want to contact other societies and get a whole new world of literature, art, music, and so on? Seems to me like a "computer society" would go out of their way to seek out other civilisations just so they could exchange ideas. Maybe they'd also want to seek societies that are radically different from their own -- like ours -- so as to get the most unique stuff they can.
All purely speculative, of course, but I don't think it's at all safe to assume that just because a society may be absurdly more advanced than we are, or shed their physicality entirely, would then becoming completely closed-off.
After all we may study chimps but we don't go out of our way to show up in the middle of nowhere to say hello.
Actually, we have tried to communicate with chimps, at least a little. The main reason we don't bother is because they don't really have a civilisation. You can bet that if they did, even if we considered it ridiculously primitive, we'd want to learn all we could about their art and music and literature and such -- even if none of it was of particular use or benefit to humans. I think that's just the way we are, and who is to say an alien life form wouldn't have that sense of curiosity as well?
In the history of recorded music there has always been an expectation that once you purchase it, it's yours to enjoy for as long as the media itself is capable of playing it. Your wax cylinder might not have lasted long but the shopkeep wasn't going to come rip it out of your hands whenever he felt like it. People listened to their records, 8 tracks, cassettes, and CDs until they fell apart, melted, cracked, or whatever -- if they ever did. And never has it been a consumer concern that someone's just going to take these things away.
Now the average yob, who knows nothing about "DRM" or "RIAA" or any of the rest, is somehow supposed to just know that the deal that's been in effect for the past hundred or so years has some new set of rules -- without being told? While, in fact, the companies peddling the wares are doing their best to perpetuate the myth that the music WILL be accessible for a lifetime like every other music purchase he's made?
No, I believe it is illegal, and likely falls into the category of consumer fraud.
I think a huge portion of the problem also comes from organisations demanding certificates where, honestly, none are needed. There are millions of sites out there where security is not even a passing issue, but for some reason they have certs, probably due to some idiotic managerial decision made years ago. And years later, everyone's stopped caring, so the site continues to have an invalid cert.
The whole thing is rather stupid. The right tool for the right job, people!
Your answers are coming off as really, really callous. Strictly speaking, you are probably right -- a rat is not worth as much as a human from a purely objective ethical or moral standpoint (though I suspect there are some who would debate this, and the discussion could get interesting).
But even if you're right, that does not mean we should be completely carefree about inflicting harm against creatures that can feel pain or fear or both, merely because they're not human. Tossing off one-word yes/no responses to that guy's questions makes it sound like there is nothing further to discuss, when in fact the issue of animal testing is a hotly contested one and not so easily answered.
2) The annual pwn2own competition, among others, shows that Linux and Windows are similarly secure and OSX is much less secure. OSX goes down first every year, while Windows and Linux both last until later days of the competition when more direct access to the systems is granted to the contestants.
First, I don't understand why this myth keeps appearing. Ubuntu is the only one that came out without being cracked.
Second, pwn2own shows what can happen if someone specifically targets your machine. No system is unbreakable to a truly determined and resourceful attacker, and nobody claims Linux is magically untouchable to such a concerted effort.
But that kind of targetted attack is not really what people care about when talking about general desktop security, is it? Nobody is targetting your mother's Windows machine, specifically. Her machine gets infected because trojans, viruses, and other malware is absurdly easy to pick up on the Windows platform just by going about her day to day work.
The thousands of exploits and vectors documented in Windows are of far more consequence to the average user than a focussed attack by a dedicated hacker deliberately trying to get into that specific machine. pwn2own demonstrates the latter threat, which is of no real concern to most users. It says nothing about the former threat, by far the more dangerous.
A Windows machine is more likely to be compromised, but that's because of market share.
This is such a tired argument. There are millions of LAMP stacks out there sitting on fat pipes. You think hackers and spammers wouldn't love to get their hands on those? The ones under my control get hammered all day, every day.
"Market Share" has nothing to do with the primary vector I notice plagues users either: Getting new apps. In any modern "desktop" disto, you get software out of a respository, which has been examined, vetted, and verified. If something's wrong with the package it won't get into the repo, and if it does, someone's going to notice quickly. It's not 100% foolproof but it's pretty damned great.
But Windows users don't have that option. Instead they scour the web looking for software which might do what they want, sift through the crippled versions, the trial versions, etc, and download a compeltely unknown binary from an unknown source, and run it. BIG SURPRISE, many of these come bundled with little extras -- trojans, adware, toolbars, and other party favors. Next thing you know the hapless Windows user is calling you to complain about how slow their computer is...
This is not a marketshare issue, it is one of many fundamental differences in the approach and structure of Windows versus Linux. If some genie made it such that Ubuntu had 90% marketshare tomorrow, that 90% of users would still be using Synaptic, and the 10% Windows users would still be downloading random executables from the web.
1) This vulnerability exists on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
As far as I can tell it exists on any platform where Flash is installed. It's not really an OS problem (though this is debatable, I guess), but an application problem. Though, the Zealot in me just has to point out that this is what happens when you deal with closed software. Now we're all waiting around twiddling our thumbs hoping Adobe will get off their butts and do something about this, because nobody else can.
it doesn't fill up with crap because crap writers don't target Linux (yet).
It also doesn't fill with crap because the expected way to get software is from the repositories, which are vetted and verified. A normal user would only have to get stuff from a third party under rather specific, special circumstances.
Contrast that with Windows where it is completely normal and expected to download random, untrusted, and often closed binaries from the web and run them. Big surprise, tons of them are bundled with crap you don't want or need which quickly bog down the OS.
Let's not forget the stupidity that is the Windows registry. Is anyone surprised that thing gets bloated and broken within a short period of time and drags the whole system down with it?
First, users don't know what certificates are, or why it matters. That should be pretty obvious.
The situation isn't helped by the fact that the overwhelming majority of invalid certs, in my experience, are just from random sites which you find with a Google search, and those sites for some reason have https instead of http as their search result. You click, and oh shock, the administrator hasn't updated his cert in ages, because nobody cares. After endless warnings about this, even I have stopped caring. It's almost a Pavlovian conditioning to see that warning and say "Yeah, whatever."
It's even worse now. Back in the day, you could dismiss these mostly spurious warnings with one click. These days, Firefox makes you go through an utterly obnoxious process of acknowledging the warning, then manually adding the certificate, then approving it. All because I needed to see some forum where people were discussing some problem I needed to solve. I am so tired of having to go through this that I just sigh and back away from the site and try to find another one that won't make me do this. I am not shocked that users just click whatever it takes to make the warnings go away.
My parents took me and some friends to Six Flags on my birthday and we rode roller coasters and ate junk food and blasted each other with water cannons and laughed ourselves silly. But if only there had been a Microsoft Store in my day...
Clearly I was born two decades too early. I feel gypped. Today's kids have no idea how lucky they are.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with anything. The world really does not revolve around Apple and Steve Jobs' quirks, and despite the (mostly self-generated) media circus surrounding Jobs' advertisements -- sorry, I mean "keynotes" -- his presentation style is not all that influental. I assure you, the phrase "one more thing..." has been used by millions of people before Jobs, and will be used by millions after.
This is akin to saying "I was at a meeting last week and the presenter was wearing a black turtleneck. Is it just me or was he totally ripping off Jobs' style?"
Sometimes, people, a cigar is just a cigar.
I guess people are annoyed that we haven't done much that's really revolutionary, or that has affected the way society functions, or affected the life of the average person, in the past forty years. Virtually everything we have now, we had forty years ago. Sure, it's advanced, and some of that is cool, but it's basically the same drek.
:P
If you were to go back in time to the 60s and talk to someone, I think he'd be pretty disappointed about the future you'd tell him. He may marvel at your cellphone, but really, he has a phone too. You can carry yours around with you, and he can't, but in the scheme of things, it's not that big a deal.
You have computers. He's heard of those, and he logically expected that they'd get better and cheaper, just like cars did in his lifetime, as the technology improves. I don't think he'd be impressed withe the fact that you can "tweet" about what you had at the deli. In fact, I suspect he'd probably think that's pretty stupid.
You have a digital camera. Fine, that's cool and all, but it's really not that much different from the camera he has. Functionally speaking, for the average yob, the only real distinction is that you don't have to jog down to the drug store to get your pictures developed, and you know what the photo will look like immediately after snapping it. Cool, but nothing really earth-shattering.
You've got an mp3 player. He's got records. But he's seen his college buddies duplicate records on reel-to-reel tapes, so he's aware that can be done and, again, if he's a clever chap, he's probably already reasoned that process will get simpler as time goes on. The fact that it has isn't all that impressive. He may possibly question the usefulness of isolating yourself from your fellow man everywhere you go, by having headphones on at all times.
He's going to want to know: Where are the moon colonies and space hotels? What, you mean you guys sat on your butts for forty years after we got to the moon? What about the robots that will do most of the work society requires, leaving humans to enjoy leisure? You don't have those either? Well, those fancy fast computers must save you lots of time so I guess you don't have to work as much as we do in the 60s. What, you work just as much? More sometimes? Are the computers at least smart, like the ones on Star Trek, thinking about ways to solve our problems? No? So, let me get this straight: No robots, no flying cars, no moon colonies, you all still work like dogs, and all you've really done is make the stuff we already have slightly cooler. Oh, and cars are safer. That's not a lot to show for forty years!
I guess the Web, considered as a whole, is pretty damned great, and the access to staggering amounts of information is amazing. He'd probably consider that a great thing, assuming you could get the concept across to him.
You also force anyone who thinks they need to counter them to spend resources on developing and deploying the countermeasures.
That is such Cold War-era reasoning, and other than a few hardline Reagan-worshipping conservatives, there is no consensus as to whether the "outspend your enemy" concept had anything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that it was about to collapse on its own due to a variety of other factors, not the least of which was pure corruption at the top levels of government.
We aren't fighting that kind of war again, and likely never will. Wars these days are going to be against barely-defined, ragtag groups of loosely-associated factions (e.g., the current Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns) who certainly are not worried about economics or countering fancy new military gear. They've been successfully harassing our highly-financed troops for years using low-tech guerilla tactics.
The other possibility of war is against another superpower, but no one wants to go there because no one wants to risk a nuclear exchange. Anyway, Russia's unlikely to ever seriously bother us, and if China wants shut down the US they could probably do it without firing a single shot, just by pulling back all investments they have.
Really, what do we need F22s for anyway? Against whom do you think they'd be useful?
I do agree that building them so you never have to use them makes a certain amount of sense, much like learning martial arts, or stocking nuclear weapons. But even without F22s the US could clean the chronometers of damn near anyone. We don't need them in order to demonstrate our military might.
What I'd really like to understand (I always ask this and I've never gotten an answer) is why some people are so for it.
Off the top of my head, one major reason is that it's clean. No more coal-fired plants belching thousands of tons of crap into the air. Even leaving aside the global-warming aspect, I shouldn't need to spell out why less pollution is a good thing. That, alone, is enough for me to support it.
It's sustainable. Breeder reactors won't run out of fuel for thousands of years, and the price of the radioactive materials is unlikely to fluctuate all that much. No more worrying about if the cost to heat my home in the winter is going to skyrocket because oil prices are so high.
It allows greater independence. If you're powering most of your country with nuclear power, then a bunch of squabbling idiots in the Middle East, artificially raising and lowering the price and availability of oil, just doesn't matter very much. It also means we keep more money circulating in our own economy instead of constantly sending it to oil shieks.