The user would go to the phishing site and hopefully realize something's wrong when everything looks different.
Or would they? A notice on the top of the site saying that "to improve security, we've currently suspended personalised styles so everyone gets the default one" or "we're currently upgrading the personalised styles (to give you the next generation of smilies;))" (or something like that) would probably take a lot of people in. I mean, look at some of the scams going round today - "update your security details", "your email address has won an email lottery", etc. I'm sure the hackers that host these sites could come up with some plausible, techie (and thus impervious to most people) 'excuse' for changing the colours.
Besides, there's the old adage that the average user will click whatever he or she thinks will let him get his task done quickest. They might think "hmm, the colours have changed" but that'll be quickly followed by "ahh, but there's the box I need to enter my details to log in".
Undoubtedly it'll help a little, but I reckon in the majority of cases colour change =/=> don't use this site.
If you really want to fix this, you make the politician's compensation a single lump sum, to be collected at the end of his first term, that's so large that he'll be set for life, with one condition: he has to survive at least one term. Then you just do something to make it easy for the electorate to throw the guy out of office before his term is up, to give him a ton of incentive to make the electorate happy for at least one term.
No, no, no, no, no. A vast number of bad political decisions are motivated by the desire to improve publicity ratings. Probably more so here in the UK than in the US, but the concept still holds. If you're to make "good" political decisions (especially w.r.t. any kind of institutional reform), you often have to think a fair way in the future. And with most things that offer a long-term benefit, they don't look so good in the short term.
I already feel that we have too much short-term thinking, with parties simply trying to stay in power through the next election, rather than looking at the nation and thinking of ways to improve it wholesomely. Telling a politician that he won't get paid unless he can prove himself to be popular means that no more daring or long-term policies get passed - it's all popular fluff.
Which I suppose links back to the root problem of a democracy... that most people are idiots. Perhaps not idiots per se - I respect people that value and prioritise other things than me - but they often fail to link cause to effect. Especially on a national political level. As a result, they are unable to make an accurate, rational decision on a policy's advantages and disadvantages - and it all comes down to spin. More specifically, culture has recently led people to "demand things now" - and they'll support shooting yourself in the foot for short term gains every time.
Everyone is entitled to have a say and to protect his own interests - but not everyone is capable of doing so. I know it's like being between a rock and a hard place, but sometimes you've just got to give the politicians the ball and let them run with it - give them sufficient guaranteed time so they can implement more comprehensive policies.
If you're curious, you can presumably use Gmail's POP service to read your messages in a client that doesn't support JavaScript (most, if not all, standalone email clients). That way you can inspect the headers, read the email and even assess the attachment without having to worry about any embedded JS.
While I have a Gmail account, I haven't checked it via the web interface for months now - checking it in Evolution gives me more power over sorting, filtering, etc. And while being able to access your mail from anywhere is handy, I find it just doesn't matter for personal mail - I can't really be expected to read and respond to it during the day anyway (no matter how horny those lesbo vixens get)...
Is Google even trying to keep secret their intentions to create an OS independent computing platform. I imagine their end goal is a Google OS appliance, perhaps even being touted as being "OS free."
"OS neutral" would be more like it. After all, you'll still need a browser to talk to their sites - and the browser will need some way of managing its memory requirements, and getting the hardware to format and present the results retrieved from Google.
This would be a good thing, though, since it would give you the flexibility to use whatever OS you felt like - so long as it came with a browser that met the spec. You could even use a form of dumb terminal (so long as such a terminal came with a graphical interface and a JavaScript browser!)...
Most importantly, it has most of Excel's functions -- including some that aren't listed or documented.
I'd be quite interested in knowing what those undocumented functions are. Then, after I've been enlightened, I'd like to know how many people actually use them.
I mean, you've all heard the 80-20 (or 90-10, depending who you ask) law - and it's a valid point that there are many people still running Office 97, since it does everything they need from it. Makes you wonder whether it was really worth Google's while including these features - I guess anyone that uses them is likely to really need them, and is a power-user likely to trust Google as their primary(/only) spreadsheet app?
For the moment, Web 2.0 stuff is undoubtedly cool and useful (Google's own Maps and GMail both good examples of both), but I wouldn't really want to rely on it. It'd be like only having a mobile phone - most of the time you don't miss a landline, but when you need to make an emergency call, you don't want to be without one. Anyone else feel the same?
(Don't get me wrong, for casual stuff like writing birthday letters this'd be great - I'm thinking of the people running businesses off it here.)
I think poorer nations have the most to gain from employing open source software.
Immediately yes, in as much as there's a zero purchasing cost, so they can immediately obtain software, where they may not have been able to afford a proprietary equivalent.
However, the real benefits of open source come with the ability to modify it to your own needs. Poorer countries are unlikely to have either the skilled developers nor the wage money to be able to make any concerted effort in this area. More affluent nations, OTOH, are more likely able to deploy whole software teams to 'customise' an open source starting base into exactly the software they want. As regards looking through the code for backdoors, etc., the article is (unusually) accurate in saying it's non-trivial, so you need developers for that too.
Of course, this is all above-and-beyond the main branch development carried out by the project's devteam, volunteer or otherwise. I suppose that F/OSS projects tend to be more open to feature requests that closed-source (especially for something/someone they believe in helping), so the poorer nations might have reasonable success asking others to develop their applications for them.
YMMV and it all depends on what the various nations are using open-source for. One thing I feel happy to conclude is that all nations, regardless of income, can benefit from F/OSS software in a variety of ways. Oh, and that the article is astroturf BS.
Personally, if the NSA, CIA, FBI or any other government agnecy, believes a terrorist organization is potentially using a segement of the internet and they want install fiber splitter to be able to filter and report on who they are talking to and what data they are passing, I, for one, am fully in favor of it.
but then go on to say
If you want to do something illegal, don't use a telephone, cell phone or the internet... if you want to thwart the Narus (or any other) data capture and processing, encrypt your data. This has also always been true for land lines, cell phones and the internet.
This to my mind is the biggest problem with a lot of the government-sponsored surveillance - do you really think that a terrorist organisation would naively send plain-text emails to each other detailing their plans? Just as with the recent story on the British Government wanting private encryption keys, this kind of behaviour simply effects the law-abiding public, as anyone doing something illegal will sidestep around it.
To do #2, you lose one or more of the things that makes email valuable
I'm not convinced... seems like the main problem with email is that it's nigh-on impossible to authenticate the source of the email accurately. If there was a simple, watertight trace back to who it was that sent the email, then spammers would very very quickly get blacklisted and be unable to spam any more.
The problem today is that there isn't an effective way to say "You're a spammer, therefore we won't handle any more emails from you". There are some cute workarounds in place, but the protocol makes it nigh-on impossible to handle this properly. Some kind of immunity to sender spamming, and possibly more explicit authentication of MTAs would at least make the information available to take action.
That's not really what the issue's about. It's not about guaranteeing equal access bandwidth to all consumers, but rather giving a particular consumer the same access speed to various destinations. It's fine for Joe Public to get 8MB/s access as opposed to Mr Smith's 4MB/s access because Joe pays more (or even if he doesn't); it's a problem if Joe can access Yahoo at 8MB/s, but he only gets 5KB/s if he tries to go to Google, because Google didn't pay tens of thousands of dollars to his ISP.
Since the ISPs aren't going to actively advertise all the sites they're screwing over, Joe will think that Google's servers are poor (or rather, he'll likely think "Google is annoyingly slow") and won't use their service. It's extortion, pure and simple - "Pay us, or we'll effectively stop our customers from being able to use your service".
(Search engines are probably a bad example because the bandwidth requirements aren't that high, but meh, you get the idea)
This really drives home how important it is for Average-Joe users to have decent security. Time was, if you got infected with a virus you'd get your hard drives wiped and have to reboot your machine. Then, viruses stole information instead. Nowadays, it seems like anyone with the inclination to do so can set up their own botnet using relatively simple tools.
And of course, if you're in the business of breaking the law online (or rather just being generally anti-social) it's simply prudent to gather an army of computers, and then use that power to make others give into your demands. The actions of one hacker and his botnet caused an entire company to shut down operation - that's scary.
And scarier still is that the thousands of people whose computers were hammering away at the server, contributing to the victory of evil over good, are unaware of the part their machines played, and will doubtless play again.
This really is the computing equivalent of creating massive private armies with a mind-control drug - and while the email system really needs an overhaul, while the possibility to harness this kind of power exists there'll be the opportunity for extortion on this scale.
Can someone enlight us with the quality and/or bitrate of 3gp videos? TFA and the wikipedia link are light on details.
3GP is just a multimedia container format - so the quality and bitrate depends on what codecs you use for the video and audio contained within it. Video is stored as MPEG-4 or H.263, and audio streams as AMR-NB or AAC-LC. 3GP does apparently describe "image sizes and bandwidth" - though from searching on www.3gpp.org I couldn't pick it out. There's a lot of technical specifications there though, so if you really want to know (as opposed to idle curiousity) I'm sure you can find out from their specifications.
...but at the end of the day it's the developer's talent and experience that tell most of the picture. It sounds like Amazon do let their developers decide (to a large extent) how their products are going to work.
The transition from the monolithic Obidos to the current SOA makes me wonder how exactly that part of the system works. Though it's not (that I could see) explictly stated, it certainly seems that adding scalability was a long and painful process. Planning for future developments like this is something that developers tend to be much better at than managers - so I wonder whether the developers didn't think about including scalability hooks in their initial efforts, whether they decided (back in the early days) that it wasn't worth it, or whether they wanted to but were told not to bother.
All said, I do applaud the public stance that Vogels is taking in his attitude. If more CxOs shared it, we'd likely have beeter-designed systems all over the shop. You hire the developer because (s)he's good at developing - so let them go to it!
On reflection, you've probably got a more balanced view than my original one. My post was based around the way the U.S.' "attitude" (if such a thing can apply to a state) generally comes across - a little too jingoistic and "you'd be better if you were like us" to my tastes. More 'sticking their oar in' than 'pleading their case'.
Though diplomatically, it's more likely to be the latter, which comes back to why I'd like to see the content of the memo - to see from what angle they approach the EU.
"There's a real question as to why the government didn't do all this fact finding first before enacting such a broad law that imposes severe criminal and civil sanctions."
A United States official denied that the American government was coming to Microsoft's aid in the antitrust dispute. "Our interest is less that than wanting to see that everything is done properly," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the tenuous nature of the matter.
Coming to Microsoft's aid or not, they are basically saying that they don't consider the EU responsible enough to make decisions on its own. It's like a gracious parent trying to help a child - except the US' role is self-appointed, and I can't imagine the EU is too happy about the situation.
I'd love to know what exactly was in that memo, since the wording would have to be just right to avoid offence - especially if you consider that there's probably some implied 'or else' condition...
...but aren't Mini-ITX boxes the usual form factor for MythTV implementations? If you're (typically) going to have a PVR in your living room, you'll want something that's low-power, quiet and preferably quite small.
Don't get me wrong, the article's a good one, but it seems like the focus of the summary is "They have MythTV on MiniITX now" - haven't we been doing this for months, if not years?
I find this especially interesting after Bill Gates mocked the $100 laptop for, among other things, "hav[ing] it be something without a disk...". Reading the specs of the laptop, it comes with 500Mb non-volatile RAM; so it does have persistant storage, it's just that storage comes in a different form to a hard drive.
Now Samsung are suggesting that other (all?) laptops "be something without a disk" - is Gates going to mock them too?
"This type of plug-and-play, click-and-hack software simply represents the commercialization of criminal activity, and in many respects lowers the technical knowledge barrier of entry to this type of crime."
Yes. Asides from the "but is it Open Source?" jokes, I'd imagine it's not difficult for anyone with the motivation to get hold of this software - and no matter what it costs, a 'customer' could easily make that amount back and more.
It just makes me think - how far do things have to go before people realise that computers are not inherently safe? I'm being careful not to imply that computers *can't* be safe, because of course they can and I'd imagine the vast majority of/. readers' are - but that it's not some whizzy technological environment where everything is great and snazzier is better.
I'm talking about end-user attitudes; for a long time, public perceptions of computers and the internet has lagged behind the realities. They've shown themselves unwilling to learn out of sheer curiousity or interest in using these new tools. They've shown themselves unwilling to learn when viruses and spyware corrupt files and destabilise operating systems. Now I wonder if they'll start to pay attention to the realities of networked devices when it hits a lot of people in the wallet.
I also wonder whether the commoditization of cracking tools will eventually shoot crackers in the foot, by making them so ubiquitous that people actually get a clue and stop falling for phishing emails. But then I remember that while crackers have the greater desire to learn and exploit, they'll always be able to stay one step ahead, and come up with some new exploit...
The U.S. has just moved one step closer to banning all Internet gambling sites (my emphasis)
Really? This is another example of jurisdiction over the internet being called into question. My first though on reading the article was whether restrictions would apply to the casino, the gamblers or both. I'd imagine they'd almost certainly apply to the casinos - make it illegal for casinos based on servers in the US to accept electronic payment - but would it also be illegal for US citizens to place bets?
FTFA:
By making it illegal to accept payments from people who live where federal or state law prohibits wagering, the legislation would impact offshore gambling Web sites used by many Americans to place bets.
I don't see how this works. If a casino is outside the U.S's jurisdiction, they shouldn't be able to be held to any U.S. laws. Sure, you can outlaw this behaviour by making it illegal for a citizen to place a bet, or more likely by forbidding U.S. financial services (e.g. banks) from processing the request, but surely you can't affect those to whom U.S. laws don't apply?
Or perhaps I'm wrong, and you can - in which case, I'm worried about the precedent that would set. Is there a limit to the extent a country can create laws that affect those who are 'unaffected' by that country's laws? To a certain extent it's reasonable, but since this case involves two jurisdictions, with the casino outside the U.S.' jurisdiction and the gambler essentially going to the virtual casino to do business, it seems unreasonable. It's like the U.S. making it illegal for Mexican casinos to allow Americans to gamble there...
This is touching on the notion of chaos as mentioned in NichG's post above. We can't completely map out a person's neural wiring, to the level where we can take and input and compute the output. More importantly, everyone is different anyway. What we can do, however, is look at the average case behaviour and with a large enough group, the observed outputs will be closer and closer to the distribution of predicted outputs. Hence you don't know what will happen with just one other person in the theater, but you can have a decent pop at predicting what'll happen with many people there.
Though that's only half of it - you've also got a nice bit of positive feedback where you'll get more people shouting "Fire!" and running, and that somehow increases the legitimacy of your claim in peoples' minds. The more people in the theater, the more chance you have of finding a few nervous souls who'll join in the shouting and stampeding out of panic, without checking whether it's real.
It seems to me that people have a certain threshold of circumstantial evidence at which they'll decide something is real; if you can get enough people with a very low (i.e. one person shouting) level for "fire in a theater", there's now several people shouting and running, which may be enough to set off more people who wouldn't have reacted were it just you - and they'll set off more people, and so on. It's easy to see how above a critical mass this can set off a chain reaction not unlike uncontrolled fission, until the whole crowd is infected and you have a stampede and/or riot.
As a result you can get situations like the Shia bridge stampede, where over 1,000 people died due to (false) rumours of a suicide bomber. Ironically, an actual bomber probably would have killed less...
Sadly, it's rarely about real-life examples like that. The decision-makers can't really present a case that "if it goes wrong, we'll look on Google and post on some forums to solve the problem" - it comes back to the old "No-one got fired for buying IBM."
Never mind that you take the option with the dedicated support, and then find the internet better anyway; it's about having something to fall back on, that won't cost people their career. This is where the hybrid options help; by paying for some form of support, companies feel they have something to leverage, and someone to pass the blame onto if something goes wrong.
A lot of corporate decision making is just about dodging the bullet if and when things go wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Or would they? A notice on the top of the site saying that "to improve security, we've currently suspended personalised styles so everyone gets the default one" or "we're currently upgrading the personalised styles (to give you the next generation of smilies
Besides, there's the old adage that the average user will click whatever he or she thinks will let him get his task done quickest. They might think "hmm, the colours have changed" but that'll be quickly followed by "ahh, but there's the box I need to enter my details to log in".
Undoubtedly it'll help a little, but I reckon in the majority of cases colour change =/=> don't use this site.
I already feel that we have too much short-term thinking, with parties simply trying to stay in power through the next election, rather than looking at the nation and thinking of ways to improve it wholesomely. Telling a politician that he won't get paid unless he can prove himself to be popular means that no more daring or long-term policies get passed - it's all popular fluff.
Which I suppose links back to the root problem of a democracy... that most people are idiots. Perhaps not idiots per se - I respect people that value and prioritise other things than me - but they often fail to link cause to effect. Especially on a national political level. As a result, they are unable to make an accurate, rational decision on a policy's advantages and disadvantages - and it all comes down to spin. More specifically, culture has recently led people to "demand things now" - and they'll support shooting yourself in the foot for short term gains every time.
Everyone is entitled to have a say and to protect his own interests - but not everyone is capable of doing so. I know it's like being between a rock and a hard place, but sometimes you've just got to give the politicians the ball and let them run with it - give them sufficient guaranteed time so they can implement more comprehensive policies.
If you're curious, you can presumably use Gmail's POP service to read your messages in a client that doesn't support JavaScript (most, if not all, standalone email clients). That way you can inspect the headers, read the email and even assess the attachment without having to worry about any embedded JS.
While I have a Gmail account, I haven't checked it via the web interface for months now - checking it in Evolution gives me more power over sorting, filtering, etc. And while being able to access your mail from anywhere is handy, I find it just doesn't matter for personal mail - I can't really be expected to read and respond to it during the day anyway (no matter how horny those lesbo vixens get)...
This would be a good thing, though, since it would give you the flexibility to use whatever OS you felt like - so long as it came with a browser that met the spec. You could even use a form of dumb terminal (so long as such a terminal came with a graphical interface and a JavaScript browser!)...
I mean, you've all heard the 80-20 (or 90-10, depending who you ask) law - and it's a valid point that there are many people still running Office 97, since it does everything they need from it. Makes you wonder whether it was really worth Google's while including these features - I guess anyone that uses them is likely to really need them, and is a power-user likely to trust Google as their primary(/only) spreadsheet app?
For the moment, Web 2.0 stuff is undoubtedly cool and useful (Google's own Maps and GMail both good examples of both), but I wouldn't really want to rely on it. It'd be like only having a mobile phone - most of the time you don't miss a landline, but when you need to make an emergency call, you don't want to be without one. Anyone else feel the same?
(Don't get me wrong, for casual stuff like writing birthday letters this'd be great - I'm thinking of the people running businesses off it here.)
However, the real benefits of open source come with the ability to modify it to your own needs. Poorer countries are unlikely to have either the skilled developers nor the wage money to be able to make any concerted effort in this area. More affluent nations, OTOH, are more likely able to deploy whole software teams to 'customise' an open source starting base into exactly the software they want. As regards looking through the code for backdoors, etc., the article is (unusually) accurate in saying it's non-trivial, so you need developers for that too.
Of course, this is all above-and-beyond the main branch development carried out by the project's devteam, volunteer or otherwise. I suppose that F/OSS projects tend to be more open to feature requests that closed-source (especially for something/someone they believe in helping), so the poorer nations might have reasonable success asking others to develop their applications for them.
YMMV and it all depends on what the various nations are using open-source for. One thing I feel happy to conclude is that all nations, regardless of income, can benefit from F/OSS software in a variety of ways. Oh, and that the article is astroturf BS.
The problem today is that there isn't an effective way to say "You're a spammer, therefore we won't handle any more emails from you". There are some cute workarounds in place, but the protocol makes it nigh-on impossible to handle this properly. Some kind of immunity to sender spamming, and possibly more explicit authentication of MTAs would at least make the information available to take action.
That's not really what the issue's about. It's not about guaranteeing equal access bandwidth to all consumers, but rather giving a particular consumer the same access speed to various destinations. It's fine for Joe Public to get 8MB/s access as opposed to Mr Smith's 4MB/s access because Joe pays more (or even if he doesn't); it's a problem if Joe can access Yahoo at 8MB/s, but he only gets 5KB/s if he tries to go to Google, because Google didn't pay tens of thousands of dollars to his ISP.
Since the ISPs aren't going to actively advertise all the sites they're screwing over, Joe will think that Google's servers are poor (or rather, he'll likely think "Google is annoyingly slow") and won't use their service. It's extortion, pure and simple - "Pay us, or we'll effectively stop our customers from being able to use your service".
(Search engines are probably a bad example because the bandwidth requirements aren't that high, but meh, you get the idea)
This really drives home how important it is for Average-Joe users to have decent security. Time was, if you got infected with a virus you'd get your hard drives wiped and have to reboot your machine. Then, viruses stole information instead. Nowadays, it seems like anyone with the inclination to do so can set up their own botnet using relatively simple tools.
And of course, if you're in the business of breaking the law online (or rather just being generally anti-social) it's simply prudent to gather an army of computers, and then use that power to make others give into your demands. The actions of one hacker and his botnet caused an entire company to shut down operation - that's scary.
And scarier still is that the thousands of people whose computers were hammering away at the server, contributing to the victory of evil over good, are unaware of the part their machines played, and will doubtless play again.
This really is the computing equivalent of creating massive private armies with a mind-control drug - and while the email system really needs an overhaul, while the possibility to harness this kind of power exists there'll be the opportunity for extortion on this scale.
3GP is just a multimedia container format - so the quality and bitrate depends on what codecs you use for the video and audio contained within it. Video is stored as MPEG-4 or H.263, and audio streams as AMR-NB or AAC-LC. 3GP does apparently describe "image sizes and bandwidth" - though from searching on www.3gpp.org I couldn't pick it out. There's a lot of technical specifications there though, so if you really want to know (as opposed to idle curiousity) I'm sure you can find out from their specifications.
...but at the end of the day it's the developer's talent and experience that tell most of the picture. It sounds like Amazon do let their developers decide (to a large extent) how their products are going to work.
The transition from the monolithic Obidos to the current SOA makes me wonder how exactly that part of the system works. Though it's not (that I could see) explictly stated, it certainly seems that adding scalability was a long and painful process. Planning for future developments like this is something that developers tend to be much better at than managers - so I wonder whether the developers didn't think about including scalability hooks in their initial efforts, whether they decided (back in the early days) that it wasn't worth it, or whether they wanted to but were told not to bother.
All said, I do applaud the public stance that Vogels is taking in his attitude. If more CxOs shared it, we'd likely have beeter-designed systems all over the shop. You hire the developer because (s)he's good at developing - so let them go to it!
On reflection, you've probably got a more balanced view than my original one. My post was based around the way the U.S.' "attitude" (if such a thing can apply to a state) generally comes across - a little too jingoistic and "you'd be better if you were like us" to my tastes. More 'sticking their oar in' than 'pleading their case'.
Though diplomatically, it's more likely to be the latter, which comes back to why I'd like to see the content of the memo - to see from what angle they approach the EU.
They're obviously holding back the big guns then - they could do a lot worse... :)
I'd love to know what exactly was in that memo, since the wording would have to be just right to avoid offence - especially if you consider that there's probably some implied 'or else' condition...
...but aren't Mini-ITX boxes the usual form factor for MythTV implementations? If you're (typically) going to have a PVR in your living room, you'll want something that's low-power, quiet and preferably quite small.
Don't get me wrong, the article's a good one, but it seems like the focus of the summary is "They have MythTV on MiniITX now" - haven't we been doing this for months, if not years?
I find this especially interesting after Bill Gates mocked the $100 laptop for, among other things, "hav[ing] it be something without a disk...". Reading the specs of the laptop, it comes with 500Mb non-volatile RAM; so it does have persistant storage, it's just that storage comes in a different form to a hard drive.
Now Samsung are suggesting that other (all?) laptops "be something without a disk" - is Gates going to mock them too?
Yes. Asides from the "but is it Open Source?" jokes, I'd imagine it's not difficult for anyone with the motivation to get hold of this software - and no matter what it costs, a 'customer' could easily make that amount back and more.
It just makes me think - how far do things have to go before people realise that computers are not inherently safe? I'm being careful not to imply that computers *can't* be safe, because of course they can and I'd imagine the vast majority of /. readers' are - but that it's not some whizzy technological environment where everything is great and snazzier is better.
I'm talking about end-user attitudes; for a long time, public perceptions of computers and the internet has lagged behind the realities. They've shown themselves unwilling to learn out of sheer curiousity or interest in using these new tools. They've shown themselves unwilling to learn when viruses and spyware corrupt files and destabilise operating systems. Now I wonder if they'll start to pay attention to the realities of networked devices when it hits a lot of people in the wallet.
I also wonder whether the commoditization of cracking tools will eventually shoot crackers in the foot, by making them so ubiquitous that people actually get a clue and stop falling for phishing emails. But then I remember that while crackers have the greater desire to learn and exploit, they'll always be able to stay one step ahead, and come up with some new exploit...
And no, Trusted Computing is not the answer.
Really? This is another example of jurisdiction over the internet being called into question. My first though on reading the article was whether restrictions would apply to the casino, the gamblers or both. I'd imagine they'd almost certainly apply to the casinos - make it illegal for casinos based on servers in the US to accept electronic payment - but would it also be illegal for US citizens to place bets?
FTFA:
I don't see how this works. If a casino is outside the U.S's jurisdiction, they shouldn't be able to be held to any U.S. laws. Sure, you can outlaw this behaviour by making it illegal for a citizen to place a bet, or more likely by forbidding U.S. financial services (e.g. banks) from processing the request, but surely you can't affect those to whom U.S. laws don't apply?
Or perhaps I'm wrong, and you can - in which case, I'm worried about the precedent that would set. Is there a limit to the extent a country can create laws that affect those who are 'unaffected' by that country's laws? To a certain extent it's reasonable, but since this case involves two jurisdictions, with the casino outside the U.S.' jurisdiction and the gambler essentially going to the virtual casino to do business, it seems unreasonable. It's like the U.S. making it illegal for Mexican casinos to allow Americans to gamble there...
Correct - it was the Chinese mystic philosopher Lao Tzu who first said it.
...and playing Civ 4 pays off again! (It's the quote you get when you research the Fishing tech, naturally...)
This is touching on the notion of chaos as mentioned in NichG's post above. We can't completely map out a person's neural wiring, to the level where we can take and input and compute the output. More importantly, everyone is different anyway. What we can do, however, is look at the average case behaviour and with a large enough group, the observed outputs will be closer and closer to the distribution of predicted outputs. Hence you don't know what will happen with just one other person in the theater, but you can have a decent pop at predicting what'll happen with many people there.
Though that's only half of it - you've also got a nice bit of positive feedback where you'll get more people shouting "Fire!" and running, and that somehow increases the legitimacy of your claim in peoples' minds. The more people in the theater, the more chance you have of finding a few nervous souls who'll join in the shouting and stampeding out of panic, without checking whether it's real.
It seems to me that people have a certain threshold of circumstantial evidence at which they'll decide something is real; if you can get enough people with a very low (i.e. one person shouting) level for "fire in a theater", there's now several people shouting and running, which may be enough to set off more people who wouldn't have reacted were it just you - and they'll set off more people, and so on. It's easy to see how above a critical mass this can set off a chain reaction not unlike uncontrolled fission, until the whole crowd is infected and you have a stampede and/or riot.
As a result you can get situations like the Shia bridge stampede, where over 1,000 people died due to (false) rumours of a suicide bomber. Ironically, an actual bomber probably would have killed less...
Check it out.
Sadly, it's rarely about real-life examples like that. The decision-makers can't really present a case that "if it goes wrong, we'll look on Google and post on some forums to solve the problem" - it comes back to the old "No-one got fired for buying IBM."
Never mind that you take the option with the dedicated support, and then find the internet better anyway; it's about having something to fall back on, that won't cost people their career. This is where the hybrid options help; by paying for some form of support, companies feel they have something to leverage, and someone to pass the blame onto if something goes wrong.
A lot of corporate decision making is just about dodging the bullet if and when things go wrong.