At what point are you declaring the GP a thief? From whom is he stealing that $100 bill? Point him out, we'll return the money. Hold up a $100 bill in a bar and ask "did anyone drop this", and your odds are probably about even that you'll get a number of folks claiming it. What kind of proof of ownership are you going to ask for?
You also seem under the impression that the police would lift a finger to return the money to the rightful owner. You're talking about an effectively anonymous object. The cost to the police to care for that item, and to identify the rightful owner are almost certain to be less than the value of the item ($100). (Quick quiz: You earn $20 an hour. How much does your employer earn for one hour of your time? Think of police officers as employees of the "police department" company, and you begin to get an idea of how worthwhile to the police department the care and feeding that altruistic act is.)
But I can't really fault you, it's the fault of the analogy. Replace "a $100 bill" with "a wallet with a $100 bill", and you've got an item that CAN be reasonably identified.
The police department intransigence may or may not be an actual issue; I'm as liable to pulling "this will happens" out of my butt as the next person. However, this essay may be of some service.
Notice that big blue expanse? Or those two parallel lines leading you out of Europe? If you wanted to take the initiative instead of bitching, you could have been anywhere on earth within a few days. But it's far easier to believe someone else is responsible and sit back while they fix your problem.
Did you see the big Euro signs next to the numbers stating how much those alternatives cost? Did you consider that vacation travel is not a minor expense to most travelers? Did you factor in the costs associated with trying to get reimbursed for using alternative modes of travel after the fact? With some portion of their cash already tied up in the air fare they'd paid for but not received?
Extending your response a bit, consider that folks got stranded considerably further away than the GP; for them, the same problems apply, but with considerably greater magnitude, and fewer ready solutions.
As well, I think your recommendations would apply as much to the airlines involved as to the passengers. Using a bit of initiative, the airlines could have offered to book these alternate modes of travel just as easily. Perhaps some even did.
I was actually wondering about that when I went to the article. The summary mentioned "Bleak atmosphere". But the purpose of a space suit is to safely work in a total absence of atmosphere.
You might take another look at the linked article.
The IPR issue is only a stick. What IBM is losing out on is mainframe repair and sales.
According to the article, "IBM allows customers to transfer the operating system license to another machine in the event that their mainframe suffers an outage....TurboHercules promotes the Hercules emulator as a "disaster recovery" solution..."
Some government entities that are required to have a failover solution, but can't afford redundant hardware see this as useful. IBM sees it as poaching on their hardware market, that they've legitimately locked in.
I would comment about your take on the patents themselves and the threat value you've assigned, but one topic at a time is enough for me.
And IBM likes having that stick available; it is still lobbying for software patents in Europe.
...is like declaring victory because you're the last person to hit the ground in the plane crash.
Been there, done that. And here, too, the players can re-shuffle the cards and deal them out again. SCO may be bankrupt (chapter 11), but they're not yet liquidated (chapter 7). The US Trustee has even stated that there is more litigation to follow. Whether he just means the IBM case, the SUSE arbitration, the Red Hat counterclaims et al, or whether he means an appeal of the jury trial, was not said.
While you are correct, that a judge can hold you liable for contract violation, in this case Comcast unilaterally changed the terms of the contract. The GP was within his rights to insist that the contract be honored, or be terminated without damages. He chose "terminated".
If you're protesting, it's really only effective if you sacrifice something to do so. Otherwise it's shallow, and the corporation/government/whoever you protest against knows you can be pushed around because you don't really care.
I disagree. Your personal sacrifice is irrelevant. What is important is how it affects the target of your protest. I agree with your examples, and all. What I disagree with is your rationale.
Imagine if the Civil Rights movement was protesting housing discrimination by committing arson. "Oooh, it's terrible. And this is a bunch of criminals who need to be brought to hand."
As well, imagine if none of the movement's actions actually got reported. How many people got arrested for being at the wrong dining counter, before the Woolworth's protest; or got thrown off a bus for sitting in the wrong place, before Rosa Parks got publicized? "Nothing to see here, move along."
Message is important. General public notice of the message is important. Tangible results to the target of the protest are important too.
Piracy loses on both counts. If you really want companies to stop using DRM, get some camera time on the evening news, and the front page of the newspaper.
I did not know the rules of the Pwn2Own contest, so came up with some things that sounded reasonable: - first hack counts for more than later hacks. - new exploits count for more than old ones. - teams succeeding on a given target (be it OS, service, whatever) split a pool of points; the more teams that target a system, the lower the value overall would be.
Looking at Tipping Point's Pwn2Own 2010 page, I find that they took on most of that: - (it looks like) first hack on a platform gets all the marbles; no counter-weighting appears to have been done for multiple successes against the same target. - platforms are weighted, presumably (but not necessarily) in difficulty.
As to "Linux vs Windows", I suppose you might count OS X in that category, as well as Android. I don't personally know if any of the other phones are Linux based. But the only general purpose computer + browser platforms in the browser category were windows and mac.
Much of the world's most valuable real estate is on the world's coastlines, which are now being eroded by global warming.
Someone else pointed out your "global warming" fallacy. I'd like to point out, though, that while some coasts have eroded, others have accreted. See: Continental Drift.
In many cases, the "erosion" you decry has been happening for literal millenia. The only reason it becomes topical is because someone relied on their coastline "remaining unchanged forever", and is QQing now because they were wrong about that.
How many cases of "unintended acceleration" have there been? 30? 50? Hell, let's be generous and say 500....The sooner we can replace human drivers with computers, the better off we'll be.
So, let me get this straight...
You're advocating replacing our current system: a comparatively simple decision making apparatus using simple sensor inputs (current engine/braking/transmission computer control), that we've currently got paired with a highly complex decision making apparatus used for image processing, steering control, and executive decisions (human wetware).
With: a logic engine that does all of the above.
Perhaps the complexity of the system you are advocating has escaped you. Complexity of the system increases both with the number of inputs and the number of correlations you draw from those inputs. Provability costs of a system increase even faster than the complexity of the system.
There is evidence that the current systems are unproven: unintended acceleration is a good example, I'm sure there are others. This does not bode well for those more complex systems you are advocating.
So yes, I'm worried about a failure rate of 0.01% in the software currently in use. I'd be worried about it even with several MORE zeroes between the decimal point and the 1. Because "just controlling your engine, transmission and brakes" is a simple problem, compared to driving in a generalized environment. I'd still be concerned in a "follow the guidewire, all computer controlled" environment.
Another good question is, would dismantling a massive, successful (fill in the blank) regime be in the interests of the people that regime rules? Or would it doing so be primarily though of in terms of the interests of the people doing the dismantling? Where the revolution is internal, those might be the same. When it is "us westerners" looking in, I'm thinking less so.
Spider Robinson posed the question of meddling in some of his work: Barring consideration of other social effects, is it acceptable to meddle, if the victim of your meddling would give permission after the fact, but not before?
If you say "yes", then the natural extension is to meddle until your victim gives you 'permission' to have done so.
If you say "no", then one is restrained from using "but they'll thank us for it later" to excuse "deprogramming". "Convenience" committal to a mental institution. Or Regime Change.
The Google analysis was based on 2 orders of magnitude more pages than the Bing one. The number of pages that pushed malware from Google were under 100. A comparison of page counts thus means that if the Bing analysis were bigger, it might well serve malware at the same rate.
Of course, with google, you're already operating at 6e-5 or so (10/150996) for your odds of coming up with malware. 42/112649 for Yahoo. 9/22948 for EBay. 0/1 (!) for wikipedia. 0/128654 for Youtube.
While I completely agree with what you've said, there are a couple of extensions I would make.
First, I prefer getting my a check from my employer vs direct deposit for much the same reason. If I want to deposit the check somewhere else, I can.
Second, you can have the best/worst of both worlds, by creating an account specifically for (some subset of) automated withdraw handling. A different account for each bill, if you want. You'd specifically want to have "automatic overdraft protection" DISABLED for any account you have automatic withdrawal *enabled* on, a) to prevent the bastards taking more than the limited amount you authorize, and b) to prevent the bank itself from dunning you for overdraft (loan) charges on the same.
Worst of both worlds, because you have to manage cash transfers INTO those accounts, losing the 'convenience' of "not having to specifically manage that bill".
LEDs in traffic signaling probably undergo a bit more mechanical stress than LED lights in your apartment, or in household devices undergo. Vibration in some, but also weather effects.
However, a traffic light likely does not need replacing if only a few, or a few strings, of LED components go out, where an incandescent bulb is an all-or-nothing proposition.
Perhaps a better LED light use to look at is in automotive lights. Tail lights I'm familiar with, and a quick google shows headlights available too.
Refuting the imaginary article in your head does nothing for the rest of us.
I'm sorry about that. Every time I think about the article itself, it takes me a bit longer than it really should. Perhaps I have a... virus or something.
There is also a cost associated with declassifying documents. It takes man-hours to "periodically analyze them, and maybe declassify" them. It takes someone finding the documents in the first place.
With electronic data storage, you also have to find a way to read the media. In the old days, a box of classified documents could be lost in the back of a warehouse. Nowadays, they can be lost on a decaying back-up tape in the back of a warehouse.... it also takes a will to declassify something. The government often lacks that will.
You left out one of the steps... Not only did the states bargain for higher pension benefits instead of higher wages, they underfunded the pension reserves. In a couple of cases, the reserves were underfunded by 60% or more.
The Chinese government has, in recent memory, censored/banned particular internet companies to the point of making them unworkable, shortly before rolling out their own Government Sponsored, nearly identical service.
You might want to consider the money aspect in this. Not only do they get absolute control over the service in China, but they get all the money from it, too.
If you think that the Chinese users will switch to using Tor and proxies to get around the Great Firewall... I can, by way of example, point you to the vast majority of American citizens who have never heard of such things. And they don't even have censorship as an excuse. The geeks may. The politicized geeks are likely to. But the common man? Not hardly.
Slashdot Mirror
At what point are you declaring the GP a thief? From whom is he stealing that $100 bill? Point him out, we'll return the money. Hold up a $100 bill in a bar and ask "did anyone drop this", and your odds are probably about even that you'll get a number of folks claiming it. What kind of proof of ownership are you going to ask for?
You also seem under the impression that the police would lift a finger to return the money to the rightful owner. You're talking about an effectively anonymous object. The cost to the police to care for that item, and to identify the rightful owner are almost certain to be less than the value of the item ($100). (Quick quiz: You earn $20 an hour. How much does your employer earn for one hour of your time? Think of police officers as employees of the "police department" company, and you begin to get an idea of how worthwhile to the police department the care and feeding that altruistic act is.)
But I can't really fault you, it's the fault of the analogy. Replace "a $100 bill" with "a wallet with a $100 bill", and you've got an item that CAN be reasonably identified.
The police department intransigence may or may not be an actual issue; I'm as liable to pulling "this will happens" out of my butt as the next person. However, this essay may be of some service.
Notice that big blue expanse? Or those two parallel lines leading you out of Europe? If you wanted to take the initiative instead of bitching, you could have been anywhere on earth within a few days. But it's far easier to believe someone else is responsible and sit back while they fix your problem.
Did you see the big Euro signs next to the numbers stating how much those alternatives cost? Did you consider that vacation travel is not a minor expense to most travelers? Did you factor in the costs associated with trying to get reimbursed for using alternative modes of travel after the fact? With some portion of their cash already tied up in the air fare they'd paid for but not received?
Extending your response a bit, consider that folks got stranded considerably further away than the GP; for them, the same problems apply, but with considerably greater magnitude, and fewer ready solutions.
As well, I think your recommendations would apply as much to the airlines involved as to the passengers. Using a bit of initiative, the airlines could have offered to book these alternate modes of travel just as easily. Perhaps some even did.
I looked at this NHTSA page, but didn't see such a study listed. Could you point me to the study you are talking about in particular?
I was actually wondering about that when I went to the article. The summary mentioned "Bleak atmosphere". But the purpose of a space suit is to safely work in a total absence of atmosphere.
You might take another look at the linked article.
The IPR issue is only a stick. What IBM is losing out on is mainframe repair and sales.
According to the article, "IBM allows customers to transfer the operating system license to another machine in the event that their mainframe suffers an outage. ...TurboHercules promotes the Hercules emulator as a "disaster recovery" solution..."
Some government entities that are required to have a failover solution, but can't afford redundant hardware see this as useful. IBM sees it as poaching on their hardware market, that they've legitimately locked in.
I would comment about your take on the patents themselves and the threat value you've assigned, but one topic at a time is enough for me.
And IBM likes having that stick available; it is still lobbying for software patents in Europe.
...is like declaring victory because you're the last person to hit the ground in the plane crash.
Been there, done that. And here, too, the players can re-shuffle the cards and deal them out again. SCO may be bankrupt (chapter 11), but they're not yet liquidated (chapter 7). The US Trustee has even stated that there is more litigation to follow. Whether he just means the IBM case, the SUSE arbitration, the Red Hat counterclaims et al, or whether he means an appeal of the jury trial, was not said.
Based on the GGP troll, perhaps the name you are looking for is Maureen O'Gara?
While you are correct, that a judge can hold you liable for contract violation, in this case Comcast unilaterally changed the terms of the contract. The GP was within his rights to insist that the contract be honored, or be terminated without damages. He chose "terminated".
If you're protesting, it's really only effective if you sacrifice something to do so. Otherwise it's shallow, and the corporation/government/whoever you protest against knows you can be pushed around because you don't really care.
I disagree. Your personal sacrifice is irrelevant. What is important is how it affects the target of your protest. I agree with your examples, and all. What I disagree with is your rationale.
Imagine if the Civil Rights movement was protesting housing discrimination by committing arson. "Oooh, it's terrible. And this is a bunch of criminals who need to be brought to hand."
As well, imagine if none of the movement's actions actually got reported. How many people got arrested for being at the wrong dining counter, before the Woolworth's protest; or got thrown off a bus for sitting in the wrong place, before Rosa Parks got publicized? "Nothing to see here, move along."
Message is important. General public notice of the message is important. Tangible results to the target of the protest are important too.
Piracy loses on both counts. If you really want companies to stop using DRM, get some camera time on the evening news, and the front page of the newspaper.
You'll be wanting folks to follow where they backed down, too. Or maybe the slashdot article...
I did not know the rules of the Pwn2Own contest, so came up with some things that sounded reasonable:
- first hack counts for more than later hacks.
- new exploits count for more than old ones.
- teams succeeding on a given target (be it OS, service, whatever) split a pool of points; the more teams that target a system, the lower the value overall would be.
Looking at Tipping Point's Pwn2Own 2010 page, I find that they took on most of that:
- (it looks like) first hack on a platform gets all the marbles; no counter-weighting appears to have been done for multiple successes against the same target.
- platforms are weighted, presumably (but not necessarily) in difficulty.
As to "Linux vs Windows", I suppose you might count OS X in that category, as well as Android. I don't personally know if any of the other phones are Linux based. But the only general purpose computer + browser platforms in the browser category were windows and mac.
Much of the world's most valuable real estate is on the world's coastlines, which are now being eroded by global warming.
Someone else pointed out your "global warming" fallacy. I'd like to point out, though, that while some coasts have eroded, others have accreted. See: Continental Drift.
In many cases, the "erosion" you decry has been happening for literal millenia. The only reason it becomes topical is because someone relied on their coastline "remaining unchanged forever", and is QQing now because they were wrong about that.
How many cases of "unintended acceleration" have there been? 30? 50? Hell, let's be generous and say 500....The sooner we can replace human drivers with computers, the better off we'll be.
So, let me get this straight...
You're advocating replacing our current system: a comparatively simple decision making apparatus using simple sensor inputs (current engine/braking/transmission computer control), that we've currently got paired with a highly complex decision making apparatus used for image processing, steering control, and executive decisions (human wetware).
With: a logic engine that does all of the above.
Perhaps the complexity of the system you are advocating has escaped you. Complexity of the system increases both with the number of inputs and the number of correlations you draw from those inputs. Provability costs of a system increase even faster than the complexity of the system.
There is evidence that the current systems are unproven: unintended acceleration is a good example, I'm sure there are others. This does not bode well for those more complex systems you are advocating.
So yes, I'm worried about a failure rate of 0.01% in the software currently in use. I'd be worried about it even with several MORE zeroes between the decimal point and the 1. Because "just controlling your engine, transmission and brakes" is a simple problem, compared to driving in a generalized environment. I'd still be concerned in a "follow the guidewire, all computer controlled" environment.
You're right. And when you're done, you'll find that energy use is still climbing. You even acknowledge that with the "... we'll need to build".
You've cut your energy use by 30% once. Can you do it twice? And how about a third time? Gets harder every time, don't it?
Another good question is, would dismantling a massive, successful (fill in the blank) regime be in the interests of the people that regime rules? Or would it doing so be primarily though of in terms of the interests of the people doing the dismantling? Where the revolution is internal, those might be the same. When it is "us westerners" looking in, I'm thinking less so.
Spider Robinson posed the question of meddling in some of his work: Barring consideration of other social effects, is it acceptable to meddle, if the victim of your meddling would give permission after the fact, but not before?
If you say "yes", then the natural extension is to meddle until your victim gives you 'permission' to have done so.
If you say "no", then one is restrained from using "but they'll thank us for it later" to excuse "deprogramming". "Convenience" committal to a mental institution. Or Regime Change.
Think about this.
The Google analysis was based on 2 orders of magnitude more pages than the Bing one. The number of pages that pushed malware from Google were under 100. A comparison of page counts thus means that if the Bing analysis were bigger, it might well serve malware at the same rate.
Of course, with google, you're already operating at 6e-5 or so (10/150996) for your odds of coming up with malware. 42/112649 for Yahoo. 9/22948 for EBay. 0/1 (!) for wikipedia. 0/128654 for Youtube.
Really? NO malware on youtube? Interesting.
I think you can still get 'slightly used' Ford Pintos whose owners have not actually deployed that feature...
While I completely agree with what you've said, there are a couple of extensions I would make.
First, I prefer getting my a check from my employer vs direct deposit for much the same reason. If I want to deposit the check somewhere else, I can.
Second, you can have the best/worst of both worlds, by creating an account specifically for (some subset of) automated withdraw handling. A different account for each bill, if you want. You'd specifically want to have "automatic overdraft protection" DISABLED for any account you have automatic withdrawal *enabled* on, a) to prevent the bastards taking more than the limited amount you authorize, and b) to prevent the bank itself from dunning you for overdraft (loan) charges on the same.
Worst of both worlds, because you have to manage cash transfers INTO those accounts, losing the 'convenience' of "not having to specifically manage that bill".
LEDs in traffic signaling probably undergo a bit more mechanical stress than LED lights in your apartment, or in household devices undergo. Vibration in some, but also weather effects.
However, a traffic light likely does not need replacing if only a few, or a few strings, of LED components go out, where an incandescent bulb is an all-or-nothing proposition.
Perhaps a better LED light use to look at is in automotive lights. Tail lights I'm familiar with, and a quick google shows headlights available too.
Refuting the imaginary article in your head does nothing for the rest of us.
I'm sorry about that. Every time I think about the article itself, it takes me a bit longer than it really should. Perhaps I have a ... virus or something.
You refer to this section of the Wikipedia article on State Secrets Privilege.
There is also a cost associated with declassifying documents. It takes man-hours to "periodically analyze them, and maybe declassify" them. It takes someone finding the documents in the first place.
With electronic data storage, you also have to find a way to read the media. In the old days, a box of classified documents could be lost in the back of a warehouse. Nowadays, they can be lost on a decaying back-up tape in the back of a warehouse. ... it also takes a will to declassify something. The government often lacks that will.
You left out one of the steps... Not only did the states bargain for higher pension benefits instead of higher wages, they underfunded the pension reserves. In a couple of cases, the reserves were underfunded by 60% or more.
The Trillion Dollar Gap: Underfunded State Retirement Systems and the Road to Reform
The Chinese government has, in recent memory, censored/banned particular internet companies to the point of making them unworkable, shortly before rolling out their own Government Sponsored, nearly identical service.
You might want to consider the money aspect in this. Not only do they get absolute control over the service in China, but they get all the money from it, too.
If you think that the Chinese users will switch to using Tor and proxies to get around the Great Firewall... I can, by way of example, point you to the vast majority of American citizens who have never heard of such things. And they don't even have censorship as an excuse. The geeks may. The politicized geeks are likely to. But the common man? Not hardly.
There's other ways to punish people and have them be productive to society, instead of rotting in prison.
I am amazed at your thrift and foresight. Instead of rotting in prison, they can be productive to society as fertilizer, rotting outside of prison!