So if terrorists used your secure telecom system to create and carry out the plans to nuke LA, and kill 10 million people, you'd be standing there saying "I am still a man"?
Sorry, that's not good enough. If I were running a telecom company, and the NSA/FBI/DHS whatever came to me, and asked me for data on my customers, I'd hope I'd have the balls to say something like "You give me reasons for what data you want on what customers, and I'll decide". I believe judges used to use this sort of criteria before granting search warrants, wire taps, etc. before what seems to have been a complete rollover. I hope I'd have the sense to say that reasons like "He was born in Lebanon", or "He travelled to Syria once" are complete BS, but reasons like "He lived with this known terrorist in Iraq, emigrated to the US, has been seen in the company of other suspicious individuals, and is studying nuclear physics, while attending classes at this mosque that preaches radical Islam" would give me pause to think, and possibly hand over the data. Like I said, it's not an easy question.
On the other hand, if they found the pictures of me, hot grits, and a naked, petrified Natalie Portman, I don't think I would have any choice.
Seriously, this is not intended as flamebait. If you founded such a company, and if because of your stand, some of your customers actually turned out to be terrorists, who then did some of the things we all fear, like setting off a nuke, how would you feel?
I personally would feel pretty devastated that by holding out for a principle that I (and you, of course) believe in, I had actually enabled a bunch of killers. That's what makes the issue difficult; if you try to uphold the liberty we all believe in, there's a chance you can help people who literally want to see us destroyed. I don't think there's an easy answer to this question.
You are correct that it's all about data mining. Interestingly (well, to me at any rate), this is reminiscent of a British controversy of the 1980's. A former British MI5 agent, Peter Wright, wrote a book about his activities spying against Russians in England at the height of the Cold War.
In it, he described a technique they used to determine which of the many cultural attaches at the Russian embassy were KGB. They set up radio monitors near the embassy, and correlated radio traffic - just the traffic, mind, as it was encrypted, and they had no idea of the message contents - with the entry and exit of various Russians. In surprisingly short periods of time, they were able to identify key controllers and residents.
When Wright published his book, the British government tried to get him charged under the Official Secrets Act. As he had wisely buggered off to Tasmania, they were unable to reach him. When the British press tried to print excerpts (the book was banned), they were charged with contempt. Here's what's somewhat hopeful in this story: the Law Lords (Britain's equal to the Supreme Court) eventually decided that since the material was available elsewhere in the world, it was pointless to try to restrict it in Britain. An early case of "information wanting to be free"?
Yes, and your grandma's phone still works, doesn't it? Let's see how many months you get out of your $5 WalMart
special. When I buy a cheap handset, it usually doesn't last a year.
At&T's goal was to install the phone and *never* have to service it. Service calls cost money! Part of the design "test" was to hammer in a nail with the handset, crack walnuts with it, etc. As for features - considering it was designed in the day of rotary switches with pulse signalling - there weren't a lot of features possible. So they built a rock solid product that did exactly what it was designed to do for years.
My grandfather died in 1996, and we removed a phone he had installed in 1932. 64 years and still working - I think that's an excellent piece of design.
Bell Labs did enormous technical work in hardware and software - where did Unix start, after all?
But one other little known area they did work in was, of all things, economics. The Bell System Journal of Economics contained many ground-breaking papers on the structure, regulation, and pricing of utilities. One classic paper by Richard Posner in 1975 introduced the "capture theory of regulation". He wrote that when an industry is supposed to be regulated by the "public", which is represented by some board or trustees, the industry has an intense and concentrated desire to get the board to see things its way, while the public's desire to (say) have lower prices is more diffuse. In addition, the industry will have the technical and legal experts (and the cash to pay them), while the public depends on volunteers and/or screaming harpies with axes to grind to make their case. The inevitable result, he wrote, is the board becomes "captured" by the industry, and basically does what the industry wants.
RTFA. The water that is drawn out of the lake is used in a heat exchanger, and then is passed to the
pumping station for treatment before going out as the local water supply. This water was coming out of
the lake before; they're just drawing from a slightly cooler source. No hot water is being passed into the
lake.
And even if the entire 61 MW was being passed into the lake, 24/7/365? It works out to about 500 trillion calories, which is not enough heat to raise 1 cubic km of water 1 degree C. Considering Lake Ontario has
some 1639 cubic km of water, the net effect will be zero.
In Toronto, a recent project takes cold water (4 degrees C) from Lake Ontario, and uses it to provide
air conditioning to downtown office buildings. According to the news reports:
Buildings that have joined the grid no longer need to use electricity to run chillers and save nearly 90 per cent of their power costs. The amount of coal-fired electricity required to run air conditioning in those same buildings would produce 79,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases the equivalent of 15,800 cars on the road, the company estimates.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.h tml?id=7dcd955a-d69f-4bc7-a553-9a4798d388ed&k=8946 7/
Actually, the reason I asked the question was not about performance but to identify viruses, malware, spyware, etc. I have a firewall and anti-virus software, but I'm paranoid.
" But in those areas where they want to compete and eventually and hopefully win, if they can't win out of the box, they better play fair with the other kids or they won't be allowed to play."
Kevin Turner, COO, Microsoft: "Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business.... Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off of our plate".
Given that MS doesn't even have a product in this particular area, and also given that this quotation is less than two weeks old, the comment above seems hopelessly naive.
Phil is completely correct. Think about how often on your daily commute you are waiting
at a stoplight, crawling along at 5 mph on an expressway, etc. None of these are optimal
conditions for a gas/diesel engine for efficiency, let alone emissions.
Any electric car overcomes these problems - it emits zero emissions when it's not moving, or
just crawling along. And since electric cars don't use power while they are sitting at stop lights or in traffic jams, they use aggregately less power than gas/diesel cars.
Still, I think the short term solution has to be gas/electric hybrids. Electric for your short trips around town/commute, etc., with the flexibility to use gas for longer trips. This type of change is eminently doable, relatively inexpensive in terms of infrastructure, and perhaps most important, won't immediately piss off the oil companies.
I agree that compensation for the artist is important. My issue is how many times do I have to compensate the artist for the same work?
For example, I bought Steely Dan's "Can't buy a thrill" twice on vinyl (both warped after a while), once on cassette (thrown out the window somewhere between Toronto and Montreal after being processed into an unreadable string of spaghetti), and once on CD (stolen while my car was in police impound). Now, I think Becker and Fagen are music gods, but how many times do I have to pay them to hear "Reeling in the Years"? I've downloaded those songs via P2P, and I have to say, I feel zero guilt about doing so; I paid for them many times over.
I understand why DRM is an issue; artists need to compensated for new material. But given that the record companies have pushed us technologies that fail after use (vinyl, tape) and then demand we repurchase rights to music we've already paid for, just to get it in a more robust format, I also understand why many users are pissed off.
This is not fully thought out, but maybe record companies should adopt a short time frame monopoly; you can't copy stuff for five years after it is introduced, for example. After that, it's ok. I mean, can you remember the hot songs of 2001? I can't.
I realize you're excessively ignorant, but where do you think the first
artificial insulin came from? Two Canadians, Banting and Best, developed
it over 80 years ago. It's highly ironic that you would choose to parade
your stupidity in this particular thread.
Would the hardware manufacturers necessarily ask for bids for default browsers, search, etc?
Is it not at least thinkable that they might choose the programs that they think offer the best functionality to their users? If MS locked up Dell with IE, isn't there a chance that (say) HP would offer Firefox as a differentiator? If you're selling 1 million PCs a year, and you think that offering a different set of apps might help you sell more PCs, wouldn't that more than balance out a $5 or $6 million offer to put an inferior product on your system?
Let me be the first..
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 5, Funny
As a type II, non-insulin dependent (yet) diabetic, I for one welcome our new safflower overlords.
"Along the lines of what you're talking about, though, you're right. I love how the state and federal government is slowly (and not-so-slowly in some cases) making everything illegal. That way, they can arrest any citizen at any time for whatever reason--or no reason at all--because, well, they're doing something illegal. It's truly sad."
Didn't Orwell write something like that in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Why do you assume these people are guilty of credit card or other fraud? They have been in operation for a number of years; if there were significant complaints about them, the credit card companies would stop honouring their charges. And the gamblers, who are not as significantly stupid as you assume, would avoid the site in droves.
The New Yorker had an article some time ago about on-line poker sites. They put a lot of software effort into tracking betting patterns, to ensure that two or three players at one table are not colluding to rip off the other players. Why do they do this? Because they're aware that if their customers perceived the games as rigged, they wouldn't come back. Their own self-interest keeps them honest.
I wish some people here actually KNEW something about the telephone network.
First off, there are still hundreds of thousands of miles of copper wire in
the network. Much of it is connected to 'loading coils', which are essentially
low-pass filters. Any frequencies over 4kHz are attenuated, so your 44kHz is
just a dream. Telephone engineers knew that; that's why they picked the 8kHz
sampling rate (Nyquist theory).
Second, as someone else pointed out, there remains the question of getting every
single telco, and switch (PBX), upgraded to support 16kHz sampling. That's not
going to happen for a very long time, given that 8kHz sampling works just fine.
If you have trouble hearing someone, it's probably due to a lousy local loop at
one end, not sampling; on a full digital end-to-end call, you can hear people breathing.
This sounds more like a technology in search of a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, that's not good enough. If I were running a telecom company, and the NSA/FBI/DHS whatever came to me, and asked me for data on my customers, I'd hope I'd have the balls to say something like "You give me reasons for what data you want on what customers, and I'll decide". I believe judges used to use this sort of criteria before granting search warrants, wire taps, etc. before what seems to have been a complete rollover. I hope I'd have the sense to say that reasons like "He was born in Lebanon", or "He travelled to Syria once" are complete BS, but reasons like "He lived with this known terrorist in Iraq, emigrated to the US, has been seen in the company of other suspicious individuals, and is studying nuclear physics, while attending classes at this mosque that preaches radical Islam" would give me pause to think, and possibly hand over the data. Like I said, it's not an easy question.
On the other hand, if they found the pictures of me, hot grits, and a naked, petrified Natalie Portman, I don't think I would have any choice.
I personally would feel pretty devastated that by holding out for a principle that I (and you, of course) believe in, I had actually enabled a bunch of killers. That's what makes the issue difficult; if you try to uphold the liberty we all believe in, there's a chance you can help people who literally want to see us destroyed. I don't think there's an easy answer to this question.
In it, he described a technique they used to determine which of the many cultural attaches at the Russian embassy were KGB. They set up radio monitors near the embassy, and correlated radio traffic - just the traffic, mind, as it was encrypted, and they had no idea of the message contents - with the entry and exit of various Russians. In surprisingly short periods of time, they were able to identify key controllers and residents.
When Wright published his book, the British government tried to get him charged under the Official Secrets Act. As he had wisely buggered off to Tasmania, they were unable to reach him. When the British press tried to print excerpts (the book was banned), they were charged with contempt. Here's what's somewhat hopeful in this story: the Law Lords (Britain's equal to the Supreme Court) eventually decided that since the material was available elsewhere in the world, it was pointless to try to restrict it in Britain. An early case of "information wanting to be free"?
At&T's goal was to install the phone and *never* have to service it. Service calls cost money! Part of the design "test" was to hammer in a nail with the handset, crack walnuts with it, etc. As for features - considering it was designed in the day of rotary switches with pulse signalling - there weren't a lot of features possible. So they built a rock solid product that did exactly what it was designed to do for years.
My grandfather died in 1996, and we removed a phone he had installed in 1932. 64 years and still working - I think that's an excellent piece of design.
But one other little known area they did work in was, of all things, economics. The Bell System Journal of Economics contained many ground-breaking papers on the structure, regulation, and pricing of utilities. One classic paper by Richard Posner in 1975 introduced the "capture theory of regulation". He wrote that when an industry is supposed to be regulated by the "public", which is represented by some board or trustees, the industry has an intense and concentrated desire to get the board to see things its way, while the public's desire to (say) have lower prices is more diffuse. In addition, the industry will have the technical and legal experts (and the cash to pay them), while the public depends on volunteers and/or screaming harpies with axes to grind to make their case. The inevitable result, he wrote, is the board becomes "captured" by the industry, and basically does what the industry wants.
Explains a lot, don't you think?
RTFA. The water that is drawn out of the lake is used in a heat exchanger, and then is passed to the pumping station for treatment before going out as the local water supply. This water was coming out of the lake before; they're just drawing from a slightly cooler source. No hot water is being passed into the lake.
And even if the entire 61 MW was being passed into the lake, 24/7/365? It works out to about 500 trillion calories, which is not enough heat to raise 1 cubic km of water 1 degree C. Considering Lake Ontario has some 1639 cubic km of water, the net effect will be zero.
Who modded it up?
Buildings that have joined the grid no longer need to use electricity to run chillers and save nearly 90 per cent of their power costs. The amount of coal-fired electricity required to run air conditioning in those same buildings would produce 79,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases the equivalent of 15,800 cars on the road, the company estimates. http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.h tml?id=7dcd955a-d69f-4bc7-a553-9a4798d388ed&k=8946 7/
Actually, the reason I asked the question was not about performance but to identify viruses, malware, spyware, etc. I have a firewall and anti-virus software, but I'm paranoid.
2. Pull string
3. .....
4. Profit!
Yes, Hormel Foods is based in Austin, MN.
Kevin Turner, COO, Microsoft: "Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business.... Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off of our plate".
Given that MS doesn't even have a product in this particular area, and also given that this quotation is less than two weeks old, the comment above seems hopelessly naive.
Phil is completely correct. Think about how often on your daily commute you are waiting at a stoplight, crawling along at 5 mph on an expressway, etc. None of these are optimal conditions for a gas/diesel engine for efficiency, let alone emissions. Any electric car overcomes these problems - it emits zero emissions when it's not moving, or just crawling along. And since electric cars don't use power while they are sitting at stop lights or in traffic jams, they use aggregately less power than gas/diesel cars. Still, I think the short term solution has to be gas/electric hybrids. Electric for your short trips around town/commute, etc., with the flexibility to use gas for longer trips. This type of change is eminently doable, relatively inexpensive in terms of infrastructure, and perhaps most important, won't immediately piss off the oil companies.
For example, I bought Steely Dan's "Can't buy a thrill" twice on vinyl (both warped after a while), once on cassette (thrown out the window somewhere between Toronto and Montreal after being processed into an unreadable string of spaghetti), and once on CD (stolen while my car was in police impound). Now, I think Becker and Fagen are music gods, but how many times do I have to pay them to hear "Reeling in the Years"? I've downloaded those songs via P2P, and I have to say, I feel zero guilt about doing so; I paid for them many times over.
I understand why DRM is an issue; artists need to compensated for new material. But given that the record companies have pushed us technologies that fail after use (vinyl, tape) and then demand we repurchase rights to music we've already paid for, just to get it in a more robust format, I also understand why many users are pissed off.
This is not fully thought out, but maybe record companies should adopt a short time frame monopoly; you can't copy stuff for five years after it is introduced, for example. After that, it's ok. I mean, can you remember the hot songs of 2001? I can't.
I realize you're excessively ignorant, but where do you think the first artificial insulin came from? Two Canadians, Banting and Best, developed it over 80 years ago. It's highly ironic that you would choose to parade your stupidity in this particular thread.
Would the hardware manufacturers necessarily ask for bids for default browsers, search, etc? Is it not at least thinkable that they might choose the programs that they think offer the best functionality to their users? If MS locked up Dell with IE, isn't there a chance that (say) HP would offer Firefox as a differentiator? If you're selling 1 million PCs a year, and you think that offering a different set of apps might help you sell more PCs, wouldn't that more than balance out a $5 or $6 million offer to put an inferior product on your system?
As a type II, non-insulin dependent (yet) diabetic, I for one welcome our new safflower overlords.
Didn't Orwell write something like that in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Why, yes, I am new here!
Why do you assume these people are guilty of credit card or other fraud? They have been in operation for a number of years; if there were significant complaints about them, the credit card companies would stop honouring their charges. And the gamblers, who are not as significantly stupid as you assume, would avoid the site in droves. The New Yorker had an article some time ago about on-line poker sites. They put a lot of software effort into tracking betting patterns, to ensure that two or three players at one table are not colluding to rip off the other players. Why do they do this? Because they're aware that if their customers perceived the games as rigged, they wouldn't come back. Their own self-interest keeps them honest.
Didn't Moses freak out when he came down from the mountain, and found his people "casting lots"?
I wish some people here actually KNEW something about the telephone network. First off, there are still hundreds of thousands of miles of copper wire in the network. Much of it is connected to 'loading coils', which are essentially low-pass filters. Any frequencies over 4kHz are attenuated, so your 44kHz is just a dream. Telephone engineers knew that; that's why they picked the 8kHz sampling rate (Nyquist theory). Second, as someone else pointed out, there remains the question of getting every single telco, and switch (PBX), upgraded to support 16kHz sampling. That's not going to happen for a very long time, given that 8kHz sampling works just fine. If you have trouble hearing someone, it's probably due to a lousy local loop at one end, not sampling; on a full digital end-to-end call, you can hear people breathing. This sounds more like a technology in search of a problem.