You may be right. But it's also above 0.1%, which in any decent-sized convention is enough to ensure a few assholes. What's more important is that almost all the times, the assholes' assholey behavior towards women is not challenged by the non-assholes present. They tend to just watch.
I base this on having attended a few conventions with female colleagues and observing how they are treated. There's a sufficiently-high number of misogynists in geek culture and a distressingly-high number of apathetic bystanders to make many tech conventions pretty unwelcoming for women.
Publishers aren't Amazon's suppliers: writers are. Publishers are just middle-men who get in the way.
Good luck with self-publishing, then. Having actually had a book published, I appreciate all of the things a publisher does (editing, production, marketing) that I wouldn't be able to do myself.
Squeezing your suppliers' profit margins is never a good long-term strategy. Amazon is not yet powerful enough to completely dictate to publishers; if they band together and reject Amazon, Amazon will soon be left with no worthwhile content.
If Amazon needs more money, it can raise its prices slightly. There are effectively no viable competitors in the online book market and Amazon's prices are very low, so it does have some room to move without annoying its suppliers.
Yes, that's too bad if you buy books, but in the long run it's better for everyone to get a fair share of the profits.
They could make the car into a plane. Want to stop? Just flip the wings to the flying position and take off. You lose lots of kinetic energy as you ascend; when the speed is reasonable, you glide back down to earth.
Though... I guess the engineering challenges in making a plane that suddenly takes off at 1600km/h are quite substantial.
Hold on for a metre while I think about this... Yes, lazy reporters who get their units wrong should be sprayed with five square metres of water and then shocked with a 20-coulomb current. Maybe then they'll spend the small extra mass needed to do proper research...
The article is really making the point that cloud service providers should use virtualization to provide their services rather than running their cloud offerings on bare-metal physical servers. He's comparing Internap (bare metal) with AWS (virtualization).
Just like I don't get to see your mother's medical records, or your cousin's mental health admissions details or that you didn't pay your cable bill for 3 months in 1999.
My mother's medical records or cousin's mental health admissions details are not public records; they are private medical information. If those ever ended up on the Internet, then yes: I would fight to have them taken down and fight to have Google not return them.
The cable bill case may or may not be a matter of public record, depending on the jurisdiction. If the information should not be in the public domain, then again... I agree with you.
But the plaintiff in this case made no attempt to say that the information about him was not accurate, and AFAIK he didn't dispute that it's a matter of public record. He just didn't like the information.
Many of us on this side have been able to request information be corrected or deleted from data controllers for like 25 years
If the plaintiff successfully got the information corrected or deleted from the official public record, then I would be 100% behind his fight to get Google not to serve it up in a search result.
But he didn't do that. He just didn't want Google serving up search results to information he didn't like. Not untrue information; not information that should have been deleted... just information he didn't like.
First of all, it's not necessarily true that newspapers publish intensely personal information only about public servants and celebrities. I've read plenty of stories with personal information about "average guys".
Secondly, why should public servants and celebrities be any less entitled to privacy than anyone else?
You are not thinking creatively enough.:) In the USA, corporations have many of the rights of a person. And the Scientologists could easily find creative lawyers who could reasonably claim that the anti-Scientology material names names and is therefore hurting particular people.
Can you think of some compelling reason for Google to inform anyone on the planet that searches for some ordinary person's name that they had financial problems and couldn't pay their mortgage in the 90s? Or that they had an embarrassing illness? That they were sexually assaulted?
If these things are a matter of public record, then Google should serve them up in a search. If they were not a matter of public record and someone posted them maliciously, maybe you'd have a point.
The problem is that once we start allowing people to block things about themselves they don't like, the whole system is opened up for tremendous abuse. In this case, the public interest in not altering historical facts should take precedence over individuals' dislike of those facts.
The material the plaintiff in this case wanted removed was not owned by him. It was simply the fact that at some point in the past, his home had been foreclosed --- a matter of public record.
Why should personal info appear on internet when it was never your intention to put it there?
It wasn't personal information; it was public information. And you might as well ask: Why should newspapers be allowed to report anything about you? Let's face it, some newspapers (tabloids, for example) publish intensely personal information about people and while many find it distasteful, no-one is suggesting that the tabloids should be censored.
It's one thing to get Google to take down a link to information that can be used for identity theft, or to information that is libelous, or to information that can put you in harm's way.
The plaintiff in this case, however, wanted Google to take down information that was absolutely true and in no way useful for identity theft. He just wanted the information taken down because he didn't like it. There's no way Google should have been forced to do that.
Sure, at first glance it looks good, but really this is a bad decision. We're going to see Scientologists demanding removal of any anti-Scientology material. The whole thing is a bit Stalinesque... people feel they have the right to erase the past just as Stalin erased those who fell out of favor from photographs.
Once what you do is in the public record, it's out there. You have no more right to demand its removal from the Internet than you do to demand libraries cut out articles about you from archived newspapers.
Encryption can be applied at various layers. You can have link-layer encryption (level 2), network-layer encryption such as IPSec (level 3), transport-layer encryption such as SSL (level 4) and application-layer encryption such as SSH (layer 7)
Also, it is not a positive endorsement when "the civilized parts of the world" have a card system forced upon them by their governments.
That statement makes no sense at all. Where I live, my government was democratically elected. So I think it makes more sense for the government (which is accountable to us) "force" a system on us rather than merchants or payment-processors (which are accountable only to their shareholders.)
Who would decide the point at which security had sufficiently improved, though?
A technical committee with representation from merchants and the card companies would have to come to some sort of agreement.
Unfortunately, it would cost billions to upgrade the US's entire infrastructure to support it, and I honestly don't see anyone picking up the tab for any part of such an upgrade any time soon.
We here in Canada did it pretty quickly. Granted, we only have 10% of the population of the US, but it was still a big and worthwhile infrastructure upgrade.
The point is that if there's a security breach, the merchants are the ones who take it on the chin, not the credit card companies. That's why merchants need to get the CC companies to clean up their acts.
I'm not particularly fond of Wal-Mart. However, as a merchant who suffers the whims of credit-card company policies, I'm really glad to see someone beating up on VISA. As another poster said, Wal-Mart might just be big enough to succeed.
I would love to see a group of large merchants get together and pick one credit card company (let's say MasterCard) and simply refuse to accept it unless security is improved. Yes, customers would complain, but if the merchants spun it correctly as trying to improve customer security and reduce identity theft, I think MasterCard would cave. Then move on to VISA.
But by then, the Earth's rotation will have slowed so a day is longer and a year is no longer 365 days and the Morlocks will need their own calendar reform.
Any password-generation algorithm that is not based on a cryptographically-secure random number generator reduces the search space and makes it easier to guess passwords.
I do not believe in "easy to remember" passwords. I believe in strong passwords, which of necessity are hard to remember, so they have to be written down and stored safely, or stored in a password keeper protected by strong encryption and as long a passphrase as you can get away with.
Slashdot Mirror
And the number of assholes is way under 1%.
You may be right. But it's also above 0.1%, which in any decent-sized convention is enough to ensure a few assholes. What's more important is that almost all the times, the assholes' assholey behavior towards women is not challenged by the non-assholes present. They tend to just watch.
I base this on having attended a few conventions with female colleagues and observing how they are treated. There's a sufficiently-high number of misogynists in geek culture and a distressingly-high number of apathetic bystanders to make many tech conventions pretty unwelcoming for women.
Good luck with self-publishing, then. Having actually had a book published, I appreciate all of the things a publisher does (editing, production, marketing) that I wouldn't be able to do myself.
Squeezing your suppliers' profit margins is never a good long-term strategy. Amazon is not yet powerful enough to completely dictate to publishers; if they band together and reject Amazon, Amazon will soon be left with no worthwhile content.
If Amazon needs more money, it can raise its prices slightly. There are effectively no viable competitors in the online book market and Amazon's prices are very low, so it does have some room to move without annoying its suppliers.
Yes, that's too bad if you buy books, but in the long run it's better for everyone to get a fair share of the profits.
Umm... no.
They could make the car into a plane. Want to stop? Just flip the wings to the flying position and take off. You lose lots of kinetic energy as you ascend; when the speed is reasonable, you glide back down to earth.
Though... I guess the engineering challenges in making a plane that suddenly takes off at 1600km/h are quite substantial.
Hold on for a metre while I think about this... Yes, lazy reporters who get their units wrong should be sprayed with five square metres of water and then shocked with a 20-coulomb current. Maybe then they'll spend the small extra mass needed to do proper research...
The article is really making the point that cloud service providers should use virtualization to provide their services rather than running their cloud offerings on bare-metal physical servers. He's comparing Internap (bare metal) with AWS (virtualization).
Just like I don't get to see your mother's medical records, or your cousin's mental health admissions details or that you didn't pay your cable bill for 3 months in 1999.
My mother's medical records or cousin's mental health admissions details are not public records; they are private medical information. If those ever ended up on the Internet, then yes: I would fight to have them taken down and fight to have Google not return them.
The cable bill case may or may not be a matter of public record, depending on the jurisdiction. If the information should not be in the public domain, then again... I agree with you.
But the plaintiff in this case made no attempt to say that the information about him was not accurate, and AFAIK he didn't dispute that it's a matter of public record. He just didn't like the information.
Many of us on this side have been able to request information be corrected or deleted from data controllers for like 25 years
If the plaintiff successfully got the information corrected or deleted from the official public record, then I would be 100% behind his fight to get Google not to serve it up in a search result.
But he didn't do that. He just didn't want Google serving up search results to information he didn't like. Not untrue information; not information that should have been deleted... just information he didn't like.
If it was easy for Scientology to do these things, why don't you show me some examples of it being done?
How Scientology changed the internet.
There ya go.
First of all, it's not necessarily true that newspapers publish intensely personal information only about public servants and celebrities. I've read plenty of stories with personal information about "average guys".
Secondly, why should public servants and celebrities be any less entitled to privacy than anyone else?
Scientology is not a person
You are not thinking creatively enough. :) In the USA, corporations have many of the rights of a person. And the Scientologists could easily find creative lawyers who could reasonably claim that the anti-Scientology material names names and is therefore hurting particular people.
Can you think of some compelling reason for Google to inform anyone on the planet that searches for some ordinary person's name that they had financial problems and couldn't pay their mortgage in the 90s? Or that they had an embarrassing illness? That they were sexually assaulted?
If these things are a matter of public record, then Google should serve them up in a search. If they were not a matter of public record and someone posted them maliciously, maybe you'd have a point.
The problem is that once we start allowing people to block things about themselves they don't like, the whole system is opened up for tremendous abuse. In this case, the public interest in not altering historical facts should take precedence over individuals' dislike of those facts.
The material the plaintiff in this case wanted removed was not owned by him. It was simply the fact that at some point in the past, his home had been foreclosed --- a matter of public record.
Why should personal info appear on internet when it was never your intention to put it there?
It wasn't personal information; it was public information. And you might as well ask: Why should newspapers be allowed to report anything about you? Let's face it, some newspapers (tabloids, for example) publish intensely personal information about people and while many find it distasteful, no-one is suggesting that the tabloids should be censored.
It's one thing to get Google to take down a link to information that can be used for identity theft, or to information that is libelous, or to information that can put you in harm's way.
The plaintiff in this case, however, wanted Google to take down information that was absolutely true and in no way useful for identity theft. He just wanted the information taken down because he didn't like it. There's no way Google should have been forced to do that.
Sure, at first glance it looks good, but really this is a bad decision. We're going to see Scientologists demanding removal of any anti-Scientology material. The whole thing is a bit Stalinesque... people feel they have the right to erase the past just as Stalin erased those who fell out of favor from photographs.
Once what you do is in the public record, it's out there. You have no more right to demand its removal from the Internet than you do to demand libraries cut out articles about you from archived newspapers.
$2 is only 16 bits, since a quarter is 2 bits...
Encryption can be applied at various layers. You can have link-layer encryption (level 2), network-layer encryption such as IPSec (level 3), transport-layer encryption such as SSL (level 4) and application-layer encryption such as SSH (layer 7)
Also, it is not a positive endorsement when "the civilized parts of the world" have a card system forced upon them by their governments.
That statement makes no sense at all. Where I live, my government was democratically elected. So I think it makes more sense for the government (which is accountable to us) "force" a system on us rather than merchants or payment-processors (which are accountable only to their shareholders.)
Knee-jerk anti-government sentiment is tiresome.
Who would decide the point at which security had sufficiently improved, though?
A technical committee with representation from merchants and the card companies would have to come to some sort of agreement.
Unfortunately, it would cost billions to upgrade the US's entire infrastructure to support it, and I honestly don't see anyone picking up the tab for any part of such an upgrade any time soon.
We here in Canada did it pretty quickly. Granted, we only have 10% of the population of the US, but it was still a big and worthwhile infrastructure upgrade.
The point is that if there's a security breach, the merchants are the ones who take it on the chin, not the credit card companies. That's why merchants need to get the CC companies to clean up their acts.
I'm not particularly fond of Wal-Mart. However, as a merchant who suffers the whims of credit-card company policies, I'm really glad to see someone beating up on VISA. As another poster said, Wal-Mart might just be big enough to succeed.
I would love to see a group of large merchants get together and pick one credit card company (let's say MasterCard) and simply refuse to accept it unless security is improved. Yes, customers would complain, but if the merchants spun it correctly as trying to improve customer security and reduce identity theft, I think MasterCard would cave. Then move on to VISA.
But by then, the Earth's rotation will have slowed so a day is longer and a year is no longer 365 days and the Morlocks will need their own calendar reform.
... but I predict that the US will switch to SI units for everyday measurements before this new calendar is adopted. :)
Any password-generation algorithm that is not based on a cryptographically-secure random number generator reduces the search space and makes it easier to guess passwords.
I do not believe in "easy to remember" passwords. I believe in strong passwords, which of necessity are hard to remember, so they have to be written down and stored safely, or stored in a password keeper protected by strong encryption and as long a passphrase as you can get away with.