I'm fairly sure the government has one or two people who know something about cyberwarfare and programming. The way this is presented, it sounds more like the Feds raiding a racetrack alongside one particular engine manufacturer purely because engines from that company put out a lot of smoke.
Have government-provided services in those industries which only provide the most basic service, for the lowest price. Postal services which can go anywhere for pennies, but they're slow. Bank accounts which pay no interest and charge no fees. Free 56k dialup from anywhere.
It leaves plenty of room for commercial interests to provide additional services as people demand them, but it does mean that it's possible to opt out of playing the big boys' game without being relegated to the sidelines.
To be egregiously correct, if you're a scientist and you don't believe in something like gravity, you better have a much better and peer-reviewable solution for observed phenomena. Failing that, though... yeah.
How about humanity as a species? It might not always be a positive higher power, but it's definitely made its mark on the world, and it's miles in front of most other higher powers in that it continues to do so in a very forthright manner every minute of every day.
But our choice is between people that want to take our money and waste it on government programs that do more harm than good, or people that want to take our money and waste it on tanks and jet fighters when our enemies are 2 guys in a pickup truck and a hunting rifle.
Make government programs publicly auditable and military weaponry illegal to buy, sell, manufacture, or support. The last time America actually needed to defend itself militarily was Pearl Harbor. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper to just have an arrangement with Canada to rent a defense force on an as-needed basis.
Why not block all ad servers, and simply use QoS on the other major bandwidth chewers? That way, if there's a lull in the Japan-related traffic, people can still access the other sites.
True, but there's nothing stopping an end node from having an IP address sourced in a jurisdiction which tends to look on American C&D orders with little more than amusement. Even if the contents of the host on that IP were set up, arranged, and administered remotely by an American.
It should also be possible, with sufficient initial setup, to have a legal system supporting a business system supporting a computer system which all allowed fairly rapid changes of situation, including which entity or chain of entities was legally responsible for a particular service.
Stross's Manfred Macx sets up something similar in _Accelerando_, such that by the time any legal request comes to him as CEO or owner of a chain of micro-companies which owns or runs something the authorities have an interest in, he's no longer technically the CEO or owner of the company in the original request, and can truthfully say that he has no idea who is, as the companies are a cloud/swarm of virtual legal entities which own and are owned by each other in an ever-changing sea of randomness.
Of course, that kind of arrangement requires that ownership and transference of ownership of such entities be able to be accomplished extremely quickly, without human intervention, and presumably at extremely minimal cost.
Precisely. Faxes also have legal statuses that email doesn't, in some jurisdictions, so faxing is still a staple in government departments, the legal profession, and in B2B transactions.
I've also never heard of a virus managing to successfully infect a fax.
By using it to store important documents. Which seems to occur over and over and over again in the annals of user support.
My own preference WRT the Recycle Bin in corporate infrastructures is to empty it at midnight local time or next boot (at the same time as clearing the temp folders and deleting local profiles older than a week). At least that stops most people losing more than a day's work at a time. Except for the ones who just put important document after important document into the Bin and never check if the documents are still there. Which is why I'd prefer to remove the drag-and-drop aspect of the Bin completely and force users to use the Delete key. At least it's marked appropriately.
The Recycle Bin isn't a terrible metaphor for home users, but as part of a corporate infrastructure with network-based backups, there shouldn't be any reason to retain a local copy of a document past the time it was last backed up. Rename the relevant icon "Files deleted today" or something similar.
I like it. Parents who brainlessly buy X-rated stuff for their kids would have less of a leg to stand on complaint-wise if all the ingredients were listed right there on the product.
"Don't tell me what to buy! Cartoons are for kids! Come on little Jimmy, get your copy of La Blue Girl and let's go."
This would only work if the users took responsibility for using their own workspace. When they choose their own desktop metaphors and setups, and STILL screw up and then bitch out the IT department for their own shortcomings, that's when said IT department should be able to tell them "Since you can't handle responsibility, you're getting the standard default locked down setup that's almost impossible to bugger up."
It's a great approach for developers, I've found. Developers who want root access can have it all they want - as long as it's on a firewalled subnet, AND all software has to be tested on standard non-root machines/accounts before release, AND the IT department's responsibility for their gear ends with the hardware and occasionally reghosting a completely hosed workstation with a vanilla build. IT is _not_ responsible for specialist builds, specialist applications, specialist setups, or doing any software troubleshooting/repair within the subnet.
The only item that looked even half useful in the real world in that video was being able to place a plain ordinary photo on the screen and have it be automatically scanned and displayed ready to be worked with.
Considering the number of users who have tried to "show" things to a computer by holding them up to a monitor, this might actually work. Scan an image, OCR a document, you name it. Just press it to the surface of the screen or tablet. A phone-based version could involve 'wiping' the phone back and forth over the document to build up an image, or simply centering it on the camera viewfinder.
Mandate efficiency levels for products sold as illuminators. Let incandescents continue to be sold as heater bulbs which just happen to also glow white.
Slashdot Mirror
* Flash headlights in sync to music
* Make beeping noise when reversing
* Transform into an autobot
I'm fairly sure the government has one or two people who know something about cyberwarfare and programming. The way this is presented, it sounds more like the Feds raiding a racetrack alongside one particular engine manufacturer purely because engines from that company put out a lot of smoke.
- to elections?
Have government-provided services in those industries which only provide the most basic service, for the lowest price. Postal services which can go anywhere for pennies, but they're slow. Bank accounts which pay no interest and charge no fees. Free 56k dialup from anywhere.
It leaves plenty of room for commercial interests to provide additional services as people demand them, but it does mean that it's possible to opt out of playing the big boys' game without being relegated to the sidelines.
To be egregiously correct, if you're a scientist and you don't believe in something like gravity, you better have a much better and peer-reviewable solution for observed phenomena. Failing that, though... yeah.
How about humanity as a species? It might not always be a positive higher power, but it's definitely made its mark on the world, and it's miles in front of most other higher powers in that it continues to do so in a very forthright manner every minute of every day.
But our choice is between people that want to take our money and waste it on government programs that do more harm than good, or people that want to take our money and waste it on tanks and jet fighters when our enemies are 2 guys in a pickup truck and a hunting rifle.
Make government programs publicly auditable and military weaponry illegal to buy, sell, manufacture, or support. The last time America actually needed to defend itself militarily was Pearl Harbor. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper to just have an arrangement with Canada to rent a defense force on an as-needed basis.
I forsee a market in cookie removers and cookies which read "Advertise to me and die in a smelter."
Why not block all ad servers, and simply use QoS on the other major bandwidth chewers? That way, if there's a lull in the Japan-related traffic, people can still access the other sites.
True, but there's nothing stopping an end node from having an IP address sourced in a jurisdiction which tends to look on American C&D orders with little more than amusement. Even if the contents of the host on that IP were set up, arranged, and administered remotely by an American.
It should also be possible, with sufficient initial setup, to have a legal system supporting a business system supporting a computer system which all allowed fairly rapid changes of situation, including which entity or chain of entities was legally responsible for a particular service.
Stross's Manfred Macx sets up something similar in _Accelerando_, such that by the time any legal request comes to him as CEO or owner of a chain of micro-companies which owns or runs something the authorities have an interest in, he's no longer technically the CEO or owner of the company in the original request, and can truthfully say that he has no idea who is, as the companies are a cloud/swarm of virtual legal entities which own and are owned by each other in an ever-changing sea of randomness.
Of course, that kind of arrangement requires that ownership and transference of ownership of such entities be able to be accomplished extremely quickly, without human intervention, and presumably at extremely minimal cost.
Or arrange things so that it's not obvious who runs the exit node, how to contact you, or even if you're in a particular country.
Coming soon: Google Vote. :)
Lawyers become senior lawyers, then politicians, who set the policies which create a society which demands lawyers...
On an entirely different note, why does previewing a comment take the best part of a minute?
Because Slashdot has hired two million out-of-work people to handle each one manually. :)
You can't ask him to show up bald. There's hell-toupee.
...Respond with Trojan?
Precisely. Faxes also have legal statuses that email doesn't, in some jurisdictions, so faxing is still a staple in government departments, the legal profession, and in B2B transactions.
I've also never heard of a virus managing to successfully infect a fax.
By using it to store important documents. Which seems to occur over and over and over again in the annals of user support.
My own preference WRT the Recycle Bin in corporate infrastructures is to empty it at midnight local time or next boot (at the same time as clearing the temp folders and deleting local profiles older than a week). At least that stops most people losing more than a day's work at a time. Except for the ones who just put important document after important document into the Bin and never check if the documents are still there. Which is why I'd prefer to remove the drag-and-drop aspect of the Bin completely and force users to use the Delete key. At least it's marked appropriately.
The Recycle Bin isn't a terrible metaphor for home users, but as part of a corporate infrastructure with network-based backups, there shouldn't be any reason to retain a local copy of a document past the time it was last backed up. Rename the relevant icon "Files deleted today" or something similar.
Oh, you've read the synopsis? :)
Into coffee, thus reducing it to a previously solved joke.
Xerox tried that. A black market sprang up in photocopier machines. People like to OWN the stuff they use.
I like it. Parents who brainlessly buy X-rated stuff for their kids would have less of a leg to stand on complaint-wise if all the ingredients were listed right there on the product.
"Don't tell me what to buy! Cartoons are for kids! Come on little Jimmy, get your copy of La Blue Girl and let's go."
This would only work if the users took responsibility for using their own workspace. When they choose their own desktop metaphors and setups, and STILL screw up and then bitch out the IT department for their own shortcomings, that's when said IT department should be able to tell them "Since you can't handle responsibility, you're getting the standard default locked down setup that's almost impossible to bugger up."
It's a great approach for developers, I've found. Developers who want root access can have it all they want - as long as it's on a firewalled subnet, AND all software has to be tested on standard non-root machines/accounts before release, AND the IT department's responsibility for their gear ends with the hardware and occasionally reghosting a completely hosed workstation with a vanilla build. IT is _not_ responsible for specialist builds, specialist applications, specialist setups, or doing any software troubleshooting/repair within the subnet.
The only item that looked even half useful in the real world in that video was being able to place a plain ordinary photo on the screen and have it be automatically scanned and displayed ready to be worked with.
Considering the number of users who have tried to "show" things to a computer by holding them up to a monitor, this might actually work. Scan an image, OCR a document, you name it. Just press it to the surface of the screen or tablet. A phone-based version could involve 'wiping' the phone back and forth over the document to build up an image, or simply centering it on the camera viewfinder.
Mandate efficiency levels for products sold as illuminators. Let incandescents continue to be sold as heater bulbs which just happen to also glow white.