First off, the 'harm' that is caused by child porn is of many types:
- Obvious, physical abuse - Ditto, emotional abuse - Recognized in depictions later in life, more emotional abuse
Woops. I wonder how the children, the pictures of whose faces were used, would feel if they were sent these photos. Or if their parents received them.
This is harm. He's gonna lose this one.
If nothing else, perhaps we need copyright law expanded to permit damages when someone uses images of you for specific profit, or penalties if used in the commission of a crime. Ok, I like the second thing better. Let's stick to that.
The reality is that this stuff is harmful, unless someone goes to the extent of creating a lifelike completely artificial child's face. And then even you may create a face that is too close in appearance to a real child's face... And we go down the same road.
"We recently acquired an older project where we needed to simply change the title block on each page, and this process took roughly 5000 hours. For something on the scale of the space shuttle, 370 million isn't unheard of."
Unless the project encompassed >50,000 drawings, you're doing it wrong.
>2 Man-years to change title blocks? And these aren't even objects per se, just drawing formatting. Important, but not actual objects, if you get my drift.
You're just doing it wrong.
I would not be surprised that some ant at NASA thinks they are racing down the river, and this whole conversion thing is getting in their way. Time to jump off the log.
I once moved to be able to have reliable access at home. If I lived out in the woods of Maine still, I would be telling my employers that my Internet access is pretty much useless for work. Just the way it is. But I wouldn't do it again, and I don't expect or recommend that you do.
And where I am now, in the Phoenix area, I have 3 good choices for service - Cox, Qwest, and a wireless outfit I forget the name of. No caps so far.
Then there are the cell providers, who DO cap mostly. I could get T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and Cricket. All with caps. All with various levels of service.
I feel your pain, it wasn't long ago that I had no choices for service. So I've been there. My point also included the implicit concept or making the rulse clear, so competitors had reason to come in and appeal to the market for better service. Sometimes, there is no competition because of exclusivity agreements. This is addressed at the ballot box. Tell your reps, be they city councilors or state whatevers that you want the option. Listen to them explain why it isn't a good idea. Ask to look in their wallets. That's where the problem is. Elect new ones. Repeat until results are seen. This takes longer than we want, but we need to start doing this. And be prepared to elect some serious morons...
They already DO pay rent. It's called a Right of Way (ROW) and utilities pay pole fees etc already, either to the local government, or the owners of the poles. The pole owners pay also. At least they do in Maine and Arizona. Any jurisdiction that isn't charging for ROW is missing out on $.
So what were we going to do, jack up the existing fees in response to caps? And then the providers just raise our rates to cover the cost?
And you're going to tell the providers they can't raise the rates? Wrong country. Move to Russia.
"Hard disks are more prone to catastrophic, unpredictable failures than SSDs"
Citation needed. I don't believe that for a moment. 'Unpredictable' is the word. When was the last time a hard drive told you when it was going to fail? Hopefully, not that long ago. SMART isn't completely useless.
ps- Hard Disks use similar methods to mark off bad sectors and continue on. The catastrophic failures you're probably referring to are drive and head motor failures, and of course head failure/crash. Many an iPod gets slammed around whilly-nilly, and the drives keep on chugging. I have drives over 5 years old, still fine. I've replaced drives 8 years old just because they were 'old'. No symptoms, no SMART messages, happy little drives.
I've also had drives fail in hours after installation. Or weeks.
So how long DO SSD drives expect to last in an OS environment, before substantial sectors get mapped out? Years? How many? does anyone know? Hard drives can be pretty predictable.
Just compel the ISPs to state that there is actually a limit to what they will allow you to use, the penalties/limits they impose if you exceed that limit, and what it takes to get past the limit. I'm not sure we should be legislating that Internet service be UNlimited. Sooner or later, someone will claim cell phone service is a 'right', and all plans need to be UNlimited. Not so smart, but it sounds good.
In other words, make them say 'limited' when they try to say 'unlimited', and it is NOT.
Truth in advertising. Yes, an oxymoron. Shouldn't be.
"...you can only write to a certain sector so many times till it becomes read-only"
Gee. This sounds like a potential problem for me. Rotating hard drives suffer the same problem, but the incidence is measured in years. How long might an SSD be expected to be used for the OS before sectors (bits, actually) become read-only? Half as long? A third?
This is the only thing that keeps me from trying an SSD. I know their life is substantially shorter due to the limitations of flash technology; the question of how much shorter is not yet answered with enough specificity for me.
But I'm picky. I like predictability in my data storage.
"However most HDs fail after the warranty is expired"
That's called 'end-of-life'. MOST OF EVERYTHING fails after the warranty is expired. Hard drives have a finite life. Sheesh, what an inane concept, 'most... fail after the warranty is expired'. Perhaps if most of them failed IMMEDIATELY after the warranty expired, we could have a discussion about the unfairness of it all. And of course, the definition of 'IMMEDIATELY'. For some people, this is a time frame measured in years. Feh.
Remember, the mortality rate for humans is virtually 100%. There is only one known exception in all of history, depending on your outlook. This does not make us defective by design, just mortal.
And equally cool for the 45-year old dad planning on paying his daughter's tuition this fall right after he finds a new job.
Nope, it's not fair. It was never intended to be. Trying to make it fair is a constant struggle.
- Intel threatening an all-in-one smartphone chipset
- ARM showing up everywhere, netbooks coming soon, hopeful big battery life gains and HD playback
- Microsoft feeling left out of the smart- market. (I know, insert favorite pun here)
- Android liking its chances in the netbook market
- AMD looking at netbooks for growth
It's wonderful. I may yet get a netbook with 8+ hrs battery life, touchscreen, and I can settle for a Bluetooth headset profile connection to my smartphone in my pocket.
Now, gimme the 8' screen that folds out to 8"x14", and a swiveling keyboard. Woot. And that 700MHz thingie that is supposed to make broadband ubiquitous... For under $300, and less than $40/mo for the Interwebs.
1. We don't listen to as much music that we buy as we used to. 2. We buy other stuff. 3. We do other stuff.
Hmm. I'm not typical, but I play a fair amount of gamez, have the TV on in the background, and what music I do listen to (usually at the gym or the car) is either radio, which I don't buy, or classic stuff I bought anywheres from 6 to 35 years ago. And the really old stuff I've just updated from LPs to CDs. Which last a long time now that I use players and rip my CDs that I bought.
One of the advantages of cyberwar is the ease of scale. While sending a few dozen spooks in to photo documents was a major undertaking in the 60s-70s, today you can mount a massive assault on data networks with very little in the way of hard resources. And one clever guy can do it all. Botnets give you millions of spooks.
And data is a real thing, to be dealt with. Just as a sniper would seed fear and chaos, so also either downing major banking sites or even threatening to hijack nees/finance/government sites would cause similar panic. The recent posting that T-Mobile's data was exposed caused a noticeable amount of concern, and probably increased call volume to their support desks, as well as distracted their security teams. Add to this several other warnings to other industries, and then everyone else is checking their systems. Good time to unleash the new and unknown attack, for me, as everyone starts by checking the known exploits.
Everything you would do with a gun or a bomb is just so much more interesting to prevent, detect, and mitigate when done in data. It's really nasty.
ps - is it SCADA systems you're thinking of for power distribution? Needless to say, connecting SCADA to the Internet is begging on your knees to be attacked, and pwned. Just not acceptable, and it is happening.
When I ran a little ISP, we kept a 7-day Usenet feed. It came off MCI, took almost 10GB, and was a pain to manage. We got a satellite link and cut back to 3 days, then back up to 7 when some users howled. My boss said to cut back to 3 days unless users had 'legitimate' needs, not ABPE for instance.
Users dutifully provided legitimate uses. Comp.* was the favorite.
Well, it grew to the point that storage was becoming a pain, and an hour's delay overnight got my pager whining from the ABPE fanbois going apeshit over not having the next day's segments to download over their modem link. Please.
SO we abandoned it, and got users going to MCI's Usenet feed directly. Not better, but I saved a whole server.
Some day day we will be sitting around a nice fire, beverages in hand, and waxking poetic about the demise of SMTP. How in the old days, email was so simple, except for the spam and phishing.
We are close to the end of an era. The kinder, gentler, family Internet. It hasn't been that way for a while, of course, but dammit I miss Jon Postel, and getting things done with an RFC and three guys saying "Hell yeah, it SHOULD work like that!". And being able to call someone and get a spammer shut down for a few weeks, until they found a new MCI rep. And people who's purpose was just to figure something out, not to ruin your service and strip your bank account.
I am not a programmer, nor an election official, but that process is as dumb as a blade of grass.
Why upload during the day? We are only interested in the whole day's total.
Why reset the local count? Like the server is infallible?
Why transmit ANYTHING? Like I trust even a modem call to a dedicated line. There is not much easier than diverting a landline. All you need are cutters and spare wire. My modem is just like your modem. MY server will be like your server. I can tap in and listen to a few connections and work out the details, of not for this election than for the next. Pwnage.
Really, if the concern for sending hourly updates is reliability, then reconsider the system. If the concern for sending updates is physical security and lost votes, you are doomed, get better poll monitors. If the concern is software problems, reconsider the system.
There is no need for interim results. If you want to audit the system during the day, have a team come in, stop the voting for a moment, take the tally card as would be done at the end of the day, document it and give the pool watchers a receipt, insert a new card, and voting recommences.
But paper is the simplest and surest way. Sorry, but it is.
Ultimately, we pay. We, the consumers. We the citizens.
We either pay the taxes corporations don't, or we pay the prices so that the corporations pay the taxes they can't avoid.
We pay, period. We need to wise up to this, and demand better.
First step, fire our elected officials and hire new ones. Repeat until results are obtained.
Next step, either encourage corporations to maintain their U.S. presences, or let them pay an appropriate fee/tax/penalty for going offshore. Be prepared to pay more for your next Chinese-made HDTV, your next pair of Vietnamese-made sneakers, your next half-pound of genuine Feta cheese. (Look into Feta cheese. It comes only from Greece, you know. All else is not 'FETA'. The EU is not afraid of protecitonism.)
We need to reconsider our free market slightly. A wage that lets a man earn enough to live a moral life. To be able to provide for his family. To allow his wife to focus on raising their children, if they choose. To be able to take time off.
"If corporations don't pay tax as so many Internet corporate lick-spittles shriek, then they wouldn't need ridiculously twisted foreign tax accounts and be prancing around like sooks when someone comes along and tells them to meet their obligations in their home countries would they? They would just happily pass this tax burden it along."
Ok, smartass, WHY DO THEY AVOID TAXES?
And the answer is...
Because it increases profits. There, I said it.
Should we allow tax policy to encourage moving profits offshore to avoid taxes and increase profits? Does Microsoft have ANY responsibility to pay their fair (or legal) taxes in the U.S., the country that does, largely, make their success possible? Should we not perhaps have a tax policy that discourages moving jobs offshore merely to avoid taxation? Can we in fact craft a tax policy that does any of this?
Corporations are now pretty much driven by self-interest, in a shortsighted way. Quarterly results, dividends, thwarting competition instead of out-competing, I suppose it was inevitable, but Ballmer's threat to move offshore exposes the culture of 'profit first last and always' at Microsoft.
This culture has resulted in so many industries in the U.S. being moved offshore, most notably to China. Can you buy a single piece of PC hardware that isn't made in China? What does it take to avoid Chinese-manufactured products? Is it ok to send U.S. jobs overseas only to maximize profit?
Ballmer's threat should spur this debate.
Oh, and for what it's worth, if we DID reduce or eliminate corporate taxes, prices probably wouldn't go down - you're right. Greed dictates that corporations take that opportunity to increase profits. Unless one says there is enough price pressure to lower theirs. Then the market starts working again.
And remember, potentially dealing with conflicting airspeed indications, autopilot off, system failures, etc. etc. etc.
All of this in a thunderstorm.
Sort of trying to pick up the last Cheetos from the floor of your car, dodging traffic zipping by ya, the rusty Duster in front slowing down for no reason, and the kids in the back screaming, power steering out, and no wipers.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, the 'harm' that is caused by child porn is of many types:
- Obvious, physical abuse
- Ditto, emotional abuse
- Recognized in depictions later in life, more emotional abuse
Woops. I wonder how the children, the pictures of whose faces were used, would feel if they were sent these photos. Or if their parents received them.
This is harm. He's gonna lose this one.
If nothing else, perhaps we need copyright law expanded to permit damages when someone uses images of you for specific profit, or penalties if used in the commission of a crime. Ok, I like the second thing better. Let's stick to that.
The reality is that this stuff is harmful, unless someone goes to the extent of creating a lifelike completely artificial child's face. And then even you may create a face that is too close in appearance to a real child's face... And we go down the same road.
SCOTUS made a mess of this.
"We recently acquired an older project where we needed to simply change the title block on each page, and this process took roughly 5000 hours. For something on the scale of the space shuttle, 370 million isn't unheard of."
Unless the project encompassed >50,000 drawings, you're doing it wrong.
>2 Man-years to change title blocks? And these aren't even objects per se, just drawing formatting. Important, but not actual objects, if you get my drift.
You're just doing it wrong.
I would not be surprised that some ant at NASA thinks they are racing down the river, and this whole conversion thing is getting in their way. Time to jump off the log.
I once moved to be able to have reliable access at home. If I lived out in the woods of Maine still, I would be telling my employers that my Internet access is pretty much useless for work. Just the way it is. But I wouldn't do it again, and I don't expect or recommend that you do.
And where I am now, in the Phoenix area, I have 3 good choices for service - Cox, Qwest, and a wireless outfit I forget the name of. No caps so far.
Then there are the cell providers, who DO cap mostly. I could get T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and Cricket. All with caps. All with various levels of service.
I feel your pain, it wasn't long ago that I had no choices for service. So I've been there. My point also included the implicit concept or making the rulse clear, so competitors had reason to come in and appeal to the market for better service. Sometimes, there is no competition because of exclusivity agreements. This is addressed at the ballot box. Tell your reps, be they city councilors or state whatevers that you want the option. Listen to them explain why it isn't a good idea. Ask to look in their wallets. That's where the problem is. Elect new ones. Repeat until results are seen. This takes longer than we want, but we need to start doing this. And be prepared to elect some serious morons...
They already DO pay rent. It's called a Right of Way (ROW) and utilities pay pole fees etc already, either to the local government, or the owners of the poles. The pole owners pay also. At least they do in Maine and Arizona. Any jurisdiction that isn't charging for ROW is missing out on $.
So what were we going to do, jack up the existing fees in response to caps? And then the providers just raise our rates to cover the cost?
And you're going to tell the providers they can't raise the rates? Wrong country. Move to Russia.
And now, the Administration is taking cues from TV shows. Kinda sad.
I'm guessing nVidia isn't really into the ARM market.
"Hard disks are more prone to catastrophic, unpredictable failures than SSDs"
Citation needed. I don't believe that for a moment. 'Unpredictable' is the word. When was the last time a hard drive told you when it was going to fail? Hopefully, not that long ago. SMART isn't completely useless.
ps- Hard Disks use similar methods to mark off bad sectors and continue on. The catastrophic failures you're probably referring to are drive and head motor failures, and of course head failure/crash. Many an iPod gets slammed around whilly-nilly, and the drives keep on chugging. I have drives over 5 years old, still fine. I've replaced drives 8 years old just because they were 'old'. No symptoms, no SMART messages, happy little drives.
I've also had drives fail in hours after installation. Or weeks.
So how long DO SSD drives expect to last in an OS environment, before substantial sectors get mapped out? Years? How many? does anyone know? Hard drives can be pretty predictable.
Just compel the ISPs to state that there is actually a limit to what they will allow you to use, the penalties/limits they impose if you exceed that limit, and what it takes to get past the limit. I'm not sure we should be legislating that Internet service be UNlimited. Sooner or later, someone will claim cell phone service is a 'right', and all plans need to be UNlimited. Not so smart, but it sounds good.
In other words, make them say 'limited' when they try to say 'unlimited', and it is NOT.
Truth in advertising. Yes, an oxymoron. Shouldn't be.
"...you can only write to a certain sector so many times till it becomes read-only"
Gee. This sounds like a potential problem for me. Rotating hard drives suffer the same problem, but the incidence is measured in years. How long might an SSD be expected to be used for the OS before sectors (bits, actually) become read-only? Half as long? A third?
This is the only thing that keeps me from trying an SSD. I know their life is substantially shorter due to the limitations of flash technology; the question of how much shorter is not yet answered with enough specificity for me.
But I'm picky. I like predictability in my data storage.
"However most HDs fail after the warranty is expired"
That's called 'end-of-life'. MOST OF EVERYTHING fails after the warranty is expired. Hard drives have a finite life. Sheesh, what an inane concept, 'most ... fail after the warranty is expired'. Perhaps if most of them failed IMMEDIATELY after the warranty expired, we could have a discussion about the unfairness of it all. And of course, the definition of 'IMMEDIATELY'. For some people, this is a time frame measured in years. Feh.
Remember, the mortality rate for humans is virtually 100%. There is only one known exception in all of history, depending on your outlook. This does not make us defective by design, just mortal.
And equally cool for the 45-year old dad planning on paying his daughter's tuition this fall right after he finds a new job. Nope, it's not fair. It was never intended to be. Trying to make it fair is a constant struggle.
Is that what they call them? Wow.
- Intel threatening an all-in-one smartphone chipset
- ARM showing up everywhere, netbooks coming soon, hopeful big battery life gains and HD playback
- Microsoft feeling left out of the smart- market. (I know, insert favorite pun here)
- Android liking its chances in the netbook market
- AMD looking at netbooks for growth
It's wonderful. I may yet get a netbook with 8+ hrs battery life, touchscreen, and I can settle for a Bluetooth headset profile connection to my smartphone in my pocket.
Now, gimme the 8' screen that folds out to 8"x14", and a swiveling keyboard. Woot. And that 700MHz thingie that is supposed to make broadband ubiquitous... For under $300, and less than $40/mo for the Interwebs.
I'll buy it.
1. We don't listen to as much music that we buy as we used to.
2. We buy other stuff.
3. We do other stuff.
Hmm. I'm not typical, but I play a fair amount of gamez, have the TV on in the background, and what music I do listen to (usually at the gym or the car) is either radio, which I don't buy, or classic stuff I bought anywheres from 6 to 35 years ago. And the really old stuff I've just updated from LPs to CDs. Which last a long time now that I use players and rip my CDs that I bought.
Sounds like the market is changing. Oh dear.
One of the advantages of cyberwar is the ease of scale. While sending a few dozen spooks in to photo documents was a major undertaking in the 60s-70s, today you can mount a massive assault on data networks with very little in the way of hard resources. And one clever guy can do it all. Botnets give you millions of spooks.
And data is a real thing, to be dealt with. Just as a sniper would seed fear and chaos, so also either downing major banking sites or even threatening to hijack nees/finance/government sites would cause similar panic. The recent posting that T-Mobile's data was exposed caused a noticeable amount of concern, and probably increased call volume to their support desks, as well as distracted their security teams. Add to this several other warnings to other industries, and then everyone else is checking their systems. Good time to unleash the new and unknown attack, for me, as everyone starts by checking the known exploits.
Everything you would do with a gun or a bomb is just so much more interesting to prevent, detect, and mitigate when done in data. It's really nasty.
ps - is it SCADA systems you're thinking of for power distribution? Needless to say, connecting SCADA to the Internet is begging on your knees to be attacked, and pwned. Just not acceptable, and it is happening.
...you will long for bullets, bombs, and nukes.
It will be nasty beyond measure. Worse than anything save nukes.
We need to accept this, and prepare for the inevitable.
When I ran a little ISP, we kept a 7-day Usenet feed. It came off MCI, took almost 10GB, and was a pain to manage. We got a satellite link and cut back to 3 days, then back up to 7 when some users howled. My boss said to cut back to 3 days unless users had 'legitimate' needs, not ABPE for instance.
Users dutifully provided legitimate uses. Comp.* was the favorite.
Well, it grew to the point that storage was becoming a pain, and an hour's delay overnight got my pager whining from the ABPE fanbois going apeshit over not having the next day's segments to download over their modem link. Please.
SO we abandoned it, and got users going to MCI's Usenet feed directly. Not better, but I saved a whole server.
Some day day we will be sitting around a nice fire, beverages in hand, and waxking poetic about the demise of SMTP. How in the old days, email was so simple, except for the spam and phishing.
We are close to the end of an era. The kinder, gentler, family Internet. It hasn't been that way for a while, of course, but dammit I miss Jon Postel, and getting things done with an RFC and three guys saying "Hell yeah, it SHOULD work like that!". And being able to call someone and get a spammer shut down for a few weeks, until they found a new MCI rep. And people who's purpose was just to figure something out, not to ruin your service and strip your bank account.
Ah, the days...
There was nothing there. Just an abyss. All of them.
It sucked.
The other one sucked too. Even I didn't read it.
And the other one sucks, but I don't add to it, so I don't bother.
Yours pretty much sucks also. Just sayin'...
I am not a programmer, nor an election official, but that process is as dumb as a blade of grass.
Why upload during the day? We are only interested in the whole day's total.
Why reset the local count? Like the server is infallible?
Why transmit ANYTHING? Like I trust even a modem call to a dedicated line. There is not much easier than diverting a landline. All you need are cutters and spare wire. My modem is just like your modem. MY server will be like your server. I can tap in and listen to a few connections and work out the details, of not for this election than for the next. Pwnage.
Really, if the concern for sending hourly updates is reliability, then reconsider the system. If the concern for sending updates is physical security and lost votes, you are doomed, get better poll monitors. If the concern is software problems, reconsider the system.
There is no need for interim results. If you want to audit the system during the day, have a team come in, stop the voting for a moment, take the tally card as would be done at the end of the day, document it and give the pool watchers a receipt, insert a new card, and voting recommences.
But paper is the simplest and surest way. Sorry, but it is.
A tarriff would serve. If nothing else, eliminate
the incentive to move production offshore.
No argument from me, save the next-to-last item.
Ultimately, we pay. We, the consumers. We the citizens.
We either pay the taxes corporations don't, or we pay the prices so that the corporations pay the taxes they can't avoid.
We pay, period. We need to wise up to this, and demand better.
First step, fire our elected officials and hire new ones. Repeat until results are obtained.
Next step, either encourage corporations to maintain their U.S. presences, or let them pay an appropriate fee/tax/penalty for going offshore. Be prepared to pay more for your next Chinese-made HDTV, your next pair of Vietnamese-made sneakers, your next half-pound of genuine Feta cheese. (Look into Feta cheese. It comes only from Greece, you know. All else is not 'FETA'. The EU is not afraid of protecitonism.)
We need to reconsider our free market slightly. A wage that lets a man earn enough to live a moral life. To be able to provide for his family. To allow his wife to focus on raising their children, if they choose. To be able to take time off.
"If corporations don't pay tax as so many Internet corporate lick-spittles shriek, then they wouldn't need ridiculously twisted foreign tax accounts and be prancing around like sooks when someone comes along and tells them to meet their obligations in their home countries would they? They would just happily pass this tax burden it along."
Ok, smartass, WHY DO THEY AVOID TAXES?
And the answer is...
Because it increases profits. There, I said it.
Should we allow tax policy to encourage moving profits offshore to avoid taxes and increase profits? Does Microsoft have ANY responsibility to pay their fair (or legal) taxes in the U.S., the country that does, largely, make their success possible? Should we not perhaps have a tax policy that discourages moving jobs offshore merely to avoid taxation? Can we in fact craft a tax policy that does any of this?
Corporations are now pretty much driven by self-interest, in a shortsighted way. Quarterly results, dividends, thwarting competition instead of out-competing, I suppose it was inevitable, but Ballmer's threat to move offshore exposes the culture of 'profit first last and always' at Microsoft.
This culture has resulted in so many industries in the U.S. being moved offshore, most notably to China. Can you buy a single piece of PC hardware that isn't made in China? What does it take to avoid Chinese-manufactured products? Is it ok to send U.S. jobs overseas only to maximize profit?
Ballmer's threat should spur this debate.
Oh, and for what it's worth, if we DID reduce or eliminate corporate taxes, prices probably wouldn't go down - you're right. Greed dictates that corporations take that opportunity to increase profits. Unless one says there is enough price pressure to lower theirs. Then the market starts working again.
And remember, potentially dealing with conflicting airspeed indications, autopilot off, system failures, etc. etc. etc.
All of this in a thunderstorm.
Sort of trying to pick up the last Cheetos from the floor of your car, dodging traffic zipping by ya, the rusty Duster in front slowing down for no reason, and the kids in the back screaming, power steering out, and no wipers.
In a torrential downpour.
You're not going to know what hit ya.
When you slap the 20s on your CR-V, where does the center of gravity end up?