If you can provide customers with a service they actually want and benefit from, and which is of a reasonable level of quality, a subscription model is a lot more sustainable. I would like to see some free software multiplayer games in which the business model is based on subscriptions; not wrenching fees out of people the way a lot of MMOs do right now, but providing a multiplay server that is so good (in terms of policies, uptime, etc.) that people will pay to use it. Gamers would still be free to play on other servers, no-cost or subscription based, and the companies that run subscription servers would be competing to see who could provide the best experience.
Of course, the subscription model cannot work everywhere, but I would say it is probably more sustainable in the long-term than a pay-what-you-want model, at least given our current society (the one based on greed).
Let's suppose you can perform one AES128 decryption per millisecond. How many cores would you need to brute force a single key within a decade (keeping in mind that brute force is the only publicly known ciphertext-only attack on AES)? Now, how many cores does the world's fastest (known) supercomputer have?
There is a reason that only Dan Brown novels portray supercomputers breaking modern ciphers. It is true that the NSA is believed to have a very powerful supercomputer (or perhaps several) at its disposal, but I doubt that it is used to crack modern ciphers; more likely, they are using it to analyze non-encrypted data from all their signals intelligence work, or perhaps to derive as much information as possible from encrypted transmissions (where the transmission originated, when it was sent, how big it is was, etc.).
A lot of supercomputers are not used to their fullest extent; often, this is because scientists either do not know how to program a supercomputer, or do not have enough data, or have computations that are not easily parallelized. Some supercomputer centers have started renting their time to Wall St. firms, because there is not enough demand from scientists or engineers.
Why would any American want to change that? Look at how people get to live right now: no need to choose between having a computer, having a cell phone, or having a nice pair of shoes; you can have them all, because they are cheap, because they are produced in countries where wages are low. Something is broken? Don't fix it -- just replace it! Cheap!
Sure, eventually it will all come crashing down and we'll all get a rude awakening, but until that happens, I do not think anyone will want to change the current system.
Suppose the FCC showed some spine and said, "No, this is not a merger that we can allow to happen, it would not be in the best interests of the American public." Comcast would sue, and say something to the effect of, "The FCC is going to prevent us from becoming more profitable than we already are, which is clearly a bad thing!" to which the judge would reply, "Hm, yes, you do need to be more profitable," and the FCC would be overruled. The problem is much broader: our government has forgotten that it is supposed to do what is best for all its citizens, not just those who hold stock in large corporations.
It was not until he murdered someone that he actually got in any trouble. Never mind how many run-ins he had with the police or the fact that other people had seen him hitting his girlfriend; none of that got him kicked off the team or kicked out of school.
It is no secret that athletes are held to a different standard. When it becomes a scandal, the rest of the world gets a glimpse of the truth; here's another case:
Some of the players on Binghamton's basketball team were accepted there as students without regard to their record or academic performance, simply because they showed promise as basketball players. It wasn't until several of them were arrested in a short period of time that this became a scandal that the New York Times saw fit to cover.
If you think that nobody is turning the other cheek for star athletes, I have a bridge to sell you...
The point is not about the information being public. The point is about the public being aware of it. The TSA exists so that the general public will feel like they are being protected from dangerous terrorists when they travel.
If you are in a big city, take a look around, especially in busy areas. On one side, you see the things the public is supposed to see: storefronts, public transportation, police officers, SWAT teams that just sort of stand around, etc. On the other side, you see service entrances, maintenance corridors, and unlocked doors labeled "DO NOT ENTER." The general public is kept on their toes by constantly having reminders that they need to be protected pushed in their faces, and scary-looking people with guns and dogs do a good job of that (as do enhanced pat-downs, apparently). The fact that a determined terrorist could sneak past all the security is pretty much irrelevant.
Get over it man - most of America loves college sports, and your bit of nerd ragin' isn't going to change that.
That is not really the problem. If athletes were held to the same standard as everyone else, then sure, you could call it "nerd rage" when people complain about football teams receiving so much money. The problem is that athletes, especially star athletes, are very often held to a lower academic standard than other students, and I have even seen cases where athletes are allowed to break rules and even laws without facing the same disciplinary actions as any other student would. That situation is a problem, regardless of what America loves.
Because 20,000 people won't buy tickets to watch a meeting of the Princeton Math Club.
So?
Because CBS isn't interested in buying the broadcast rights for the Dartmouth Glee Club's next season.
So?
Because rich alumni don't donate millions to keep their alma mater's Medieval History curriculum competitive.
Now we hit on the real problem: rich alumni who never really appreciated the value of an education. Of course, that implies that at one time, the school accepted people who were not really interested in receiving an education, likely an ongoing problem. Really, the core problem is simple: higher education is not really about "education." With a tiny handful of exceptions, becoming an educated person is more of an optional side effect of going to college, rather than the primary aim.
So of course those rich alumni would like to be able to say, "Yeah, that's my school!" while they are watching college football with all their friends, and could not care less about whether or not their degree actually represents anything.
I can see even average users being comfortable with sticking in a USB-stick, aka key to unlock their computer and remote account(s).
I cannot see that, to be perfectly honest. Someone will forget to bring the USB stick with them, or lose it, or put it through a washing machine, etc. I am a big fan of cryptographic authentication, but requiring people to carry a physical token around is only going to work if they are committed to security -- which is not true of most people.
The biggest problem is that people want convenience. Passwords, simply put, are so convenient that we will never quite get rid of them. People want to be able to log in from random computers, regardless of what they are carrying with them or who actually owns the computer they are using. Most people do not take security seriously enough to sacrifice a little convenience, at least not until someone takes advantage of them.
The police are the face of the law itself
on
Recording the Police
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In a sense, the police represent the public face of the law itself. If people are losing their confidence in the police, it is because they are beginning to lose their confidence in the law being just. Here in the United States, I would hardly think that is surprising, given our enormous prison population and tendency to criminalize harmless behavior that large portions of the population engage in. I cannot speak for Canada, but in the USA, we imprison so many people that only Nazi Germany and the USSR have us beat -- we actually imprison more people now than China, all convicted under our legal system.
The police do not want to be videotaped because after so many years of enforcing the sort of laws that created this situation, they know that there are people out there who want to discredit the police. The police know that their job is unpopular and they do not want the citizens to have the ability to make the police look bad. They know that they are not just going after bad people. They know that they are losing the support of the population, and that in many cases they are sent on patrol in areas where they have already lost that support.
Has anyone stopped to ask why otherwise decent people would be posting videos that put the police in such a bad light? I have said this before, and I will say it again: there is no conspiracy amongst criminals to discredit the police, we do not live in a comic book world. These are ordinary people posting videos that make the police look like violent thugs; that means that ordinary people have a problem with the police.
Personally, I do not think it is all that surprising that so many people have a problem with the police, given the size of our prison population and the fact that the police cannot turn the other cheek when it comes to enforcing our numerous laws. The police are the face of law enforcement, and by extension of the law itself, and so people who discredit the police are acting out of a general distaste for the current state of the law. I think a good first step toward repairing the relationship between the citizens and the police would be to repeal many of the laws that have landed so many decent people in prison cells (I would say innocent, but in a technical sense, they are not innocent).
So rich people more of a vote than poor people? No thanks, I think I will vote with my vote, for a party that does not just do whatever benefits large corporations the most.
not irresponsible if this is the only way to get true innovation, it seems once people get through college, they lose the ability to innovate.
Uh, you must have forgotten about all those grad students and researchers in the world, who are busy pumping out innovations that actually are changing our lives. The people who developed transistors had graduated college. So did the people who developed the Internet. So did the people who developed plastic. These are technologies that have been so innovative and ground breaking that they have permanently changed our society, and they were not invented by drop-outs.
Looking through the examples of drop-outs in the article, I am not really seeing people who invented anything transformational, so much as riding on top of the successful of transformational technologies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen? Mark Zuckerberg? Shawn Fanning is about as close as the list gets, although Napster really rides on top of the Internet's existing peer-to-peer architecture.
Maybe I am too much of a skeptic or believe too strongly in the value of education, but the way I see things, famous drop-outs were good at capitalizing on the successful research or work of people who stayed in school.
For one thing, urban sprawl had not yet increased commute times to an hour or more
Perhaps where you are from. The people of New York City have managed to deal with hour long commutes in a subway system that lacks Internet access for a long time now, and I have even seen people reading technical documents and books. It is not as impossible as you seem to think.
For another, serious study was conducted in a library, and the expected pace of such study was slower because people didn't have to compete with other people who had the Internet.
And serious study still happens in libraries, because so many books are not available online. Just this past week, I had to go to my university's library to pick up two books that were cited by a book I was reading, and I only required Internet access once to locate where in the library the books were located. I rarely find it necessary to look up a citation immediately, while I am reading; Internet access is certainly helpful and convenient, but I would not say that it is really necessary to have it everywhere that I study.
Then why not wait until one is near a computer with Internet access to start reading the book in the first place?
Because one is traveling and wants to have something to read while traveling?
In order to understand the passage containing the citation, yes it is often necessary.
I do not find this to be the case at all. Frankly, I have wonder, how do you think people managed before there was an Internet, citations could not be instantly located?
I'm sorry, but how have the economics changed? Have cell providers suddenly become less profitable, and desperately in need of new sources of revenue? They are just greedy. Why shouldn't the people look out for their own interests, and use their democracy to ensure they get the best service possible, with the least restrictions?
Slashdot Mirror
If you can provide customers with a service they actually want and benefit from, and which is of a reasonable level of quality, a subscription model is a lot more sustainable. I would like to see some free software multiplayer games in which the business model is based on subscriptions; not wrenching fees out of people the way a lot of MMOs do right now, but providing a multiplay server that is so good (in terms of policies, uptime, etc.) that people will pay to use it. Gamers would still be free to play on other servers, no-cost or subscription based, and the companies that run subscription servers would be competing to see who could provide the best experience.
Of course, the subscription model cannot work everywhere, but I would say it is probably more sustainable in the long-term than a pay-what-you-want model, at least given our current society (the one based on greed).
Let's suppose you can perform one AES128 decryption per millisecond. How many cores would you need to brute force a single key within a decade (keeping in mind that brute force is the only publicly known ciphertext-only attack on AES)? Now, how many cores does the world's fastest (known) supercomputer have?
There is a reason that only Dan Brown novels portray supercomputers breaking modern ciphers. It is true that the NSA is believed to have a very powerful supercomputer (or perhaps several) at its disposal, but I doubt that it is used to crack modern ciphers; more likely, they are using it to analyze non-encrypted data from all their signals intelligence work, or perhaps to derive as much information as possible from encrypted transmissions (where the transmission originated, when it was sent, how big it is was, etc.).
Oh, and getting rid of that blatantly abusive 'a corporation is a person' law would help to make things ~much~ clearer-cut for us all.
Good luck with that one. All the "free market" people will cry foul when you take away their government-granted limited liability.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/29/AR2010062905299.html
A lot of supercomputers are not used to their fullest extent; often, this is because scientists either do not know how to program a supercomputer, or do not have enough data, or have computations that are not easily parallelized. Some supercomputer centers have started renting their time to Wall St. firms, because there is not enough demand from scientists or engineers.
Why would any American want to change that? Look at how people get to live right now: no need to choose between having a computer, having a cell phone, or having a nice pair of shoes; you can have them all, because they are cheap, because they are produced in countries where wages are low. Something is broken? Don't fix it -- just replace it! Cheap!
Sure, eventually it will all come crashing down and we'll all get a rude awakening, but until that happens, I do not think anyone will want to change the current system.
Suppose the FCC showed some spine and said, "No, this is not a merger that we can allow to happen, it would not be in the best interests of the American public." Comcast would sue, and say something to the effect of, "The FCC is going to prevent us from becoming more profitable than we already are, which is clearly a bad thing!" to which the judge would reply, "Hm, yes, you do need to be more profitable," and the FCC would be overruled. The problem is much broader: our government has forgotten that it is supposed to do what is best for all its citizens, not just those who hold stock in large corporations.
All they need to do is look at this guy's record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Huguely
It was not until he murdered someone that he actually got in any trouble. Never mind how many run-ins he had with the police or the fact that other people had seen him hitting his girlfriend; none of that got him kicked off the team or kicked out of school.
It is no secret that athletes are held to a different standard. When it becomes a scandal, the rest of the world gets a glimpse of the truth; here's another case:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/sports/ncaafootball/30binghamton.html?_r=1
Some of the players on Binghamton's basketball team were accepted there as students without regard to their record or academic performance, simply because they showed promise as basketball players. It wasn't until several of them were arrested in a short period of time that this became a scandal that the New York Times saw fit to cover.
If you think that nobody is turning the other cheek for star athletes, I have a bridge to sell you...
The point is not about the information being public. The point is about the public being aware of it. The TSA exists so that the general public will feel like they are being protected from dangerous terrorists when they travel.
If you are in a big city, take a look around, especially in busy areas. On one side, you see the things the public is supposed to see: storefronts, public transportation, police officers, SWAT teams that just sort of stand around, etc. On the other side, you see service entrances, maintenance corridors, and unlocked doors labeled "DO NOT ENTER." The general public is kept on their toes by constantly having reminders that they need to be protected pushed in their faces, and scary-looking people with guns and dogs do a good job of that (as do enhanced pat-downs, apparently). The fact that a determined terrorist could sneak past all the security is pretty much irrelevant.
Get over it man - most of America loves college sports, and your bit of nerd ragin' isn't going to change that.
That is not really the problem. If athletes were held to the same standard as everyone else, then sure, you could call it "nerd rage" when people complain about football teams receiving so much money. The problem is that athletes, especially star athletes, are very often held to a lower academic standard than other students, and I have even seen cases where athletes are allowed to break rules and even laws without facing the same disciplinary actions as any other student would. That situation is a problem, regardless of what America loves.
Because 20,000 people won't buy tickets to watch a meeting of the Princeton Math Club.
So?
Because CBS isn't interested in buying the broadcast rights for the Dartmouth Glee Club's next season.
So?
Because rich alumni don't donate millions to keep their alma mater's Medieval History curriculum competitive.
Now we hit on the real problem: rich alumni who never really appreciated the value of an education. Of course, that implies that at one time, the school accepted people who were not really interested in receiving an education, likely an ongoing problem. Really, the core problem is simple: higher education is not really about "education." With a tiny handful of exceptions, becoming an educated person is more of an optional side effect of going to college, rather than the primary aim.
So of course those rich alumni would like to be able to say, "Yeah, that's my school!" while they are watching college football with all their friends, and could not care less about whether or not their degree actually represents anything.
Uh, is this not why we have things like Ogg Vorbis?
I can see even average users being comfortable with sticking in a USB-stick, aka key to unlock their computer and remote account(s).
I cannot see that, to be perfectly honest. Someone will forget to bring the USB stick with them, or lose it, or put it through a washing machine, etc. I am a big fan of cryptographic authentication, but requiring people to carry a physical token around is only going to work if they are committed to security -- which is not true of most people.
The biggest problem is that people want convenience. Passwords, simply put, are so convenient that we will never quite get rid of them. People want to be able to log in from random computers, regardless of what they are carrying with them or who actually owns the computer they are using. Most people do not take security seriously enough to sacrifice a little convenience, at least not until someone takes advantage of them.
Couple what you said with this:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1209-01.htm
In a sense, the police represent the public face of the law itself. If people are losing their confidence in the police, it is because they are beginning to lose their confidence in the law being just. Here in the United States, I would hardly think that is surprising, given our enormous prison population and tendency to criminalize harmless behavior that large portions of the population engage in. I cannot speak for Canada, but in the USA, we imprison so many people that only Nazi Germany and the USSR have us beat -- we actually imprison more people now than China, all convicted under our legal system.
The police do not want to be videotaped because after so many years of enforcing the sort of laws that created this situation, they know that there are people out there who want to discredit the police. The police know that their job is unpopular and they do not want the citizens to have the ability to make the police look bad. They know that they are not just going after bad people. They know that they are losing the support of the population, and that in many cases they are sent on patrol in areas where they have already lost that support.
Has anyone stopped to ask why otherwise decent people would be posting videos that put the police in such a bad light? I have said this before, and I will say it again: there is no conspiracy amongst criminals to discredit the police, we do not live in a comic book world. These are ordinary people posting videos that make the police look like violent thugs; that means that ordinary people have a problem with the police.
Personally, I do not think it is all that surprising that so many people have a problem with the police, given the size of our prison population and the fact that the police cannot turn the other cheek when it comes to enforcing our numerous laws. The police are the face of law enforcement, and by extension of the law itself, and so people who discredit the police are acting out of a general distaste for the current state of the law. I think a good first step toward repairing the relationship between the citizens and the police would be to repeal many of the laws that have landed so many decent people in prison cells (I would say innocent, but in a technical sense, they are not innocent).
Lest we forget:
http://ftp.sunet.se/jargon/html/magic-story.html
you can vote with your wallet
So rich people more of a vote than poor people? No thanks, I think I will vote with my vote, for a party that does not just do whatever benefits large corporations the most.
not irresponsible if this is the only way to get true innovation, it seems once people get through college, they lose the ability to innovate.
Uh, you must have forgotten about all those grad students and researchers in the world, who are busy pumping out innovations that actually are changing our lives. The people who developed transistors had graduated college. So did the people who developed the Internet. So did the people who developed plastic. These are technologies that have been so innovative and ground breaking that they have permanently changed our society, and they were not invented by drop-outs.
Lest we forget, it was the researchers who developed the really transformational technologies, and the college drop outs who became rich as a result.
Looking through the examples of drop-outs in the article, I am not really seeing people who invented anything transformational, so much as riding on top of the successful of transformational technologies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen? Mark Zuckerberg? Shawn Fanning is about as close as the list gets, although Napster really rides on top of the Internet's existing peer-to-peer architecture.
Maybe I am too much of a skeptic or believe too strongly in the value of education, but the way I see things, famous drop-outs were good at capitalizing on the successful research or work of people who stayed in school.
For one thing, urban sprawl had not yet increased commute times to an hour or more
Perhaps where you are from. The people of New York City have managed to deal with hour long commutes in a subway system that lacks Internet access for a long time now, and I have even seen people reading technical documents and books. It is not as impossible as you seem to think.
For another, serious study was conducted in a library, and the expected pace of such study was slower because people didn't have to compete with other people who had the Internet.
And serious study still happens in libraries, because so many books are not available online. Just this past week, I had to go to my university's library to pick up two books that were cited by a book I was reading, and I only required Internet access once to locate where in the library the books were located. I rarely find it necessary to look up a citation immediately, while I am reading; Internet access is certainly helpful and convenient, but I would not say that it is really necessary to have it everywhere that I study.
Then why not wait until one is near a computer with Internet access to start reading the book in the first place?
Because one is traveling and wants to have something to read while traveling?
In order to understand the passage containing the citation, yes it is often necessary.
I do not find this to be the case at all. Frankly, I have wonder, how do you think people managed before there was an Internet, citations could not be instantly located?
I'm sorry, but how have the economics changed? Have cell providers suddenly become less profitable, and desperately in need of new sources of revenue? They are just greedy. Why shouldn't the people look out for their own interests, and use their democracy to ensure they get the best service possible, with the least restrictions?
By waiting until you are near a computer with Internet access? Is it absolutely necessary to check citations the very moment you see them?