"If you aren't willing to put your own personal assets on the line, and nobody else is willing to put their assets on the line, then yes, it's probably either a bad idea, or the people starting it are incompetent." Kickstarter is the very definition of 'other people willing to put their assets on the line'. Whether funded by kickstarter or a loan from a bank any idea that gets funded by definition has people willing to put their assets on the line.
Or is it only big name bank assets that count in your worldview?
"That's normally called "selling" a product or service. Begging for money before there is a product or service and promising to deliver (maybe) is called a hand-out."
Or a pre-order. You know, the thing businesses have been doing for decades. I've pre-ordered plenty of games from big companies before they were ready to ship, same thing.
"Apparently you're unfamiliar with American suburbs and urban sprawl. Running errands to the city or other suburbs can easily be 60 or 70 miles round trip. Going into the city for entertainment, drinks or dining is hardly a rare thing. "
If you're regularly making 100+ mi spontaneous trips then you're an outlier and you know what, all you have to do is not buy an electric car. Problem solved.
You're arguing against scientific research with hypotheticals and anecdotes.
"More likely: drive to work for 9 am, park, plugin car and charge [along with everybody else] just so you can get home in it"
You work more than 20mi from your home? Last I heard the min mileage for these things was about 40mi per charge. So if you work, say, 15mi from your home you have 10mi a day for running errands before you have to consider a mid-day charge. Other than that allowing people to program their cars to charge only when certain circumstances are met (say, 1-6am OR battery is at 30% charge) would put most of the load on nighttime.
Really now, saying you'll have to charge for every trip is just silly. Batteries don't magically lose their charge if they sit for more than 10s...
so EVERY bad guy, including would-be bad guys, already know this? do you know it? how about you post it as an anonymous response to this comment.... i mean, it's everywhere, right?
Oh yes, because the fact that someone far removed from the problems doesn't know the details of it prove that no one could possibly already know the details. I mean, it's so obvious, no security issues exist, because I don't know about them, so if I don't know about them, then no one can, because they can't be well known. IT'S PERFECTLY REASONABLE LOGIC!/sarcasm
you mean the issue where more exposure can only lead to more exploitation, and degradation of the value of a dollar?
*citation needed*
are offenders currently prosecuted and convicted?
Probably not. It's kind of hard to arrest and prosecute someone for doing something you don't even know is possible...
if the specific exploit was plugged, would others ALWAYS still exist?
Ah yes, the great 'there will always be problems, so why bother fixing them' argument. Remind me never to work with you, you're the worst kind of person for working on technology. Will there always be issues? Probably, though not certainly. Should those issues be fixed as quickly as possible (prioritizing bigger issues of course). YES. Period. Not fixing the problem and silencing people to keep it hidden is the worst kind of security that exists. It's like sticking your head in the sand so you can't see the bad things happening around you, and it's bound to cause more issues than just fixing the problem would. But heck, if it's never going to be perfect, why not just open the thing up so that people can steal money whenever they want?
It seems to me that the people who understand the issue here the most have been intimidated into inaction by people who might or might not understand the issue but understand that revealing any flaws in their methods would mean less profit for them, and that's all they care about.
And if you stop drinking coffee your body will adapt to waking up on its own with no need for it. I used to drink tons of soda (even more caffeine than coffee) and always had to have a can in the morning to wake up, I stopped drinking it (well aside from about 2 cans worth a week) and suddenly it was significantly easier to get up in the morning, to the point where, going to sleep at the same time, I was waking up an hour earlier and feeling much better.
Caffeine is not a good way to start your day off, no matter what folgers may say. It's a useful drug for maintaining alertness every once in a while but used daily it reduces your overall alertness, which is bad.
The basic idea isn't that the 'simpler' theory wins (relativity >> newton in complexity) but rather the simplest model that explains all the data. A model that adequately explains everything we've observed without resorting to special cases (i.e. "the universe does X unless these extremely specific conditions are met, in which case it does Y') is far more likely to be true than a model that resorts to special cases, since the universe doesn't exactly check to see if the planets happen to be aligned when determining the gravitational attraction of an object.
Occam's razor is less about simplicity and more about elegant simplicity, if your theory has X rules and mine has 2X but mine explains all the data without special cases and yours requires a dozen special cases mine is more likely to be true. By the same merit the odds that massless particles obey the standard model unless they happen to be neutrinos in which case they oscillate is less likely than either the assumption that neutrinos are massless or the assumption that massless particles in general can't oscillate is incorrect.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was released with full DRM. It's currently the most pirated game of all time with millions of copies pirated. DRM is code for "easy to pirate" as well.
DRM does absolutely nothing to stop or even slow piracy. It does a lot to hurt legitimate consumers however. That's by DRM-free is the way to go.
Alright then. Let's say I release a song with no copyright, public domain. Would you download it? What if it was actually another person's song, that they had full copyright on, and I was mis-attributing and mis-tagging it? Well if the innocent infringer clause doesn't work you're responsible for the fines, regardless of the fact the song you got was tagged public domain. This case is about more than just one person having to pay fines.
"you should probably assume that you have no permissions"
'You should' and 'You have to or you'll be hit with millions of dollars of fines' are two different things. Common sense says to treat music without an attached copyright as fully copyrighted (though that does open up the question of what happens when you get a song tagged with a free copyright type that is simply mis-tagged and should be illegal to copy, then what happens?) but common sense != the law.
Copyrighted and illegal to download are two different things, or more specifically copyrighted + illegal to download doesn't apply to all copyrighted songs. Independent artists and even some major artists release songs for free all the time.
The existence of a single free to download mainstream song renders the argument that 'all mainstream music is illegal to download' invalid, and there's plenty of songs on torrents that are actually legal to download and listen too.
How do you know that? I know of at least two major artists* that have released songs for free download themselves. Did I miss out on getting the 'immediately sense when someone somewhere has claimed copyright to something' sensor when they were being passed out? Or how are you telling the 'free to download' songs from the 'not free to download' songs when both are posted without copyright?
Well here in AZ she'd be looking at a fine of about the retail price ($10*number of cd's, let's assume 10 for the sake of argument) and a fine of either $100 or $250 on top of that depending on whether you're a minor or not. So somewhere in the ballpark of $200-$350 dollars if you steal the music from a store, >1 million dollars if you pirate it.
Hmm...I wonder what cd's the borders near my house has...(kidding, kidding:P)
Actually as a petty offense I don't think you can be forced to pay more than $300 for a minor shoplifting incident, like stealing 10 CD's (mind you that's ~120 songs, which is way more than the million dollar fine was for)..
"So, perhaps they mean you can be online an unlimited number of minutes at high speed, but you just aren't allowed to do much."
Well if I hit my bandwidth cap and can't send any more data (assuming that's how the cap works) then I'm no longer online by any definition of the word, so it's not unlimited even by that definition.
"The assumption is that one of them has no cut..."
That's a ridiculous assumption. Cuts are ridiculously common.
Not to mention that your premise is flawed and dangerous. What if the guilty one got a nosebleed on the job? And the innocent one has a small papercut from a week or two ago on the job. Presence of a cut != Guilty in this case.
"Given NASA's experience with writing software that's just gotta work or else, I'd be very hard-pressed to think of no better team of programmers for the job."
You're right! I can't think of a better group of programmers to work on car acceleration issues than the guys who've lost 3 probes to software errors (mariner 1, mars climate orbitor and mars polar lander)!
NASA is not the organization it once was, and implying that their programmers get everything right is not only dangerous, but silly. Everyone makes mistakes, NASA is no exception, and calling them in is more of a PR boost than anything else.
"Almost every single piece of non-trivial software written has bugs" "dangerous development practices that aren't catching bugs like this."
You can't have it both ways. Accusing Toyota of doing something wrong because a bug like this slipped through and then saying (correctly) that all software has bugs is just a bit silly, you're effectively accusing them of not being perfect...which isn't much of an accusation.
"You know, bathroom locks in most homes and apartments can be opened with a straightened paper clip."
If you used bathroom locks on your front door I wouldn't be surprised if your house got broken into.
Is it still wrong to break into your house? Yeah, but making it far easier to do isn't very smart. If you want to be secure you put a secure lock on your front door, you don't accuse the person breaking in of violating your privacy. Same principal.
I think the GP's point was that spraying this kind of stuff is no different than any other gas attack, and there's already defense against those so rather than use some silly thing like yogurt just use a standard anti-gas measure like a gas mask and covering exposed areas.
I use it for getting directions. I have a horrible memory for names, but a great one for pictures, and so while I can't remember the name of the street I'm supposed to turn on I can remember what the street corner looked like from above on google earth, imagine what it would look like from a perspective on the ground, then see if I've reached that spot yet.
Google Earth is my goto mapping tool because it makes it FAR easier to know if you're going the right way or not if you've seen it, even just from above (though with more and more incorporated street-view you can now see street-level views of most areas).
"If your manuscript does that, eg tests the abilities of a digital camera or is used in psychological testing then I can see that it should be protected by patents as well as copyright."
It's possible to write a compiler that takes any manuscript and converts it into a useful software program. I know for a fact it's possible, because I've seen it done with other pieces of work (the Shakespeare programming language is just one example). So where are you drawing that line then?
To put it another way, give me a copyrighted work, and I'll give you a patentable* piece of machine-code for which it is the source code, which makes it a patentable piece of work. So yes, the line is very blurry.
Odd...firefox just autosaves it to the default folder (accidentally ended up bookmarking/. when I was testing looking for the bookmark shortcut and couldn't find it, which was terribly ironic when I later found the bookmark:P).
And how does this judge get his email without pinging/accessing any routers that he hasn't specifically gotten permission to access? Does he use a specific vpn hardcoded to run over a small number of routers to which he has requested and gotten permission (written in triplicate of course) to access? Or does he just break his own ruling everytime he gets a spam message?
Riiight...because putting a bookmark in someone's browser without their approval is so absurdly hard to do that the existence of such a thing is evidence. Don't like this site? Press control-D* to navigate away, or press control-D to win a prize, or press control-D to scan your computer for bad files.
* I'm pretty sure that's IE's shortcut, I don't use IE so I'm not sure, but if it's not replace it with the appropriate shortcut
Slashdot Mirror
"If you aren't willing to put your own personal assets on the line, and nobody else is willing to put their assets on the line, then yes, it's probably either a bad idea, or the people starting it are incompetent."
Kickstarter is the very definition of 'other people willing to put their assets on the line'. Whether funded by kickstarter or a loan from a bank any idea that gets funded by definition has people willing to put their assets on the line.
Or is it only big name bank assets that count in your worldview?
"That's normally called "selling" a product or service. Begging for money before there is a product or service and promising to deliver (maybe) is called a hand-out."
Or a pre-order. You know, the thing businesses have been doing for decades. I've pre-ordered plenty of games from big companies before they were ready to ship, same thing.
"Apparently you're unfamiliar with American suburbs and urban sprawl. Running errands to the city or other suburbs can easily be 60 or 70 miles round trip. Going into the city for entertainment, drinks or dining is hardly a rare thing. "
If you're regularly making 100+ mi spontaneous trips then you're an outlier and you know what, all you have to do is not buy an electric car. Problem solved.
You're arguing against scientific research with hypotheticals and anecdotes.
"More likely: drive to work for 9 am, park, plugin car and charge [along with everybody else] just so you can get home in it"
You work more than 20mi from your home? Last I heard the min mileage for these things was about 40mi per charge. So if you work, say, 15mi from your home you have 10mi a day for running errands before you have to consider a mid-day charge. Other than that allowing people to program their cars to charge only when certain circumstances are met (say, 1-6am OR battery is at 30% charge) would put most of the load on nighttime.
Really now, saying you'll have to charge for every trip is just silly. Batteries don't magically lose their charge if they sit for more than 10s...
so EVERY bad guy, including would-be bad guys, already know this? do you know it? how about you post it as an anonymous response to this comment.... i mean, it's everywhere, right?
Oh yes, because the fact that someone far removed from the problems doesn't know the details of it prove that no one could possibly already know the details. I mean, it's so obvious, no security issues exist, because I don't know about them, so if I don't know about them, then no one can, because they can't be well known. IT'S PERFECTLY REASONABLE LOGIC! /sarcasm
you mean the issue where more exposure can only lead to more exploitation, and degradation of the value of a dollar?
*citation needed*
are offenders currently prosecuted and convicted?
Probably not. It's kind of hard to arrest and prosecute someone for doing something you don't even know is possible...
if the specific exploit was plugged, would others ALWAYS still exist?
Ah yes, the great 'there will always be problems, so why bother fixing them' argument. Remind me never to work with you, you're the worst kind of person for working on technology. Will there always be issues? Probably, though not certainly. Should those issues be fixed as quickly as possible (prioritizing bigger issues of course). YES. Period. Not fixing the problem and silencing people to keep it hidden is the worst kind of security that exists. It's like sticking your head in the sand so you can't see the bad things happening around you, and it's bound to cause more issues than just fixing the problem would. But heck, if it's never going to be perfect, why not just open the thing up so that people can steal money whenever they want?
It seems to me that the people who understand the issue here the most have been intimidated into inaction by people who might or might not understand the issue but understand that revealing any flaws in their methods would mean less profit for them, and that's all they care about.
And if you stop drinking coffee your body will adapt to waking up on its own with no need for it. I used to drink tons of soda (even more caffeine than coffee) and always had to have a can in the morning to wake up, I stopped drinking it (well aside from about 2 cans worth a week) and suddenly it was significantly easier to get up in the morning, to the point where, going to sleep at the same time, I was waking up an hour earlier and feeling much better.
Caffeine is not a good way to start your day off, no matter what folgers may say. It's a useful drug for maintaining alertness every once in a while but used daily it reduces your overall alertness, which is bad.
The basic idea isn't that the 'simpler' theory wins (relativity >> newton in complexity) but rather the simplest model that explains all the data. A model that adequately explains everything we've observed without resorting to special cases (i.e. "the universe does X unless these extremely specific conditions are met, in which case it does Y') is far more likely to be true than a model that resorts to special cases, since the universe doesn't exactly check to see if the planets happen to be aligned when determining the gravitational attraction of an object.
Occam's razor is less about simplicity and more about elegant simplicity, if your theory has X rules and mine has 2X but mine explains all the data without special cases and yours requires a dozen special cases mine is more likely to be true. By the same merit the odds that massless particles obey the standard model unless they happen to be neutrinos in which case they oscillate is less likely than either the assumption that neutrinos are massless or the assumption that massless particles in general can't oscillate is incorrect.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was released with full DRM. It's currently the most pirated game of all time with millions of copies pirated. DRM is code for "easy to pirate" as well.
DRM does absolutely nothing to stop or even slow piracy. It does a lot to hurt legitimate consumers however. That's by DRM-free is the way to go.
Alright then. Let's say I release a song with no copyright, public domain. Would you download it? What if it was actually another person's song, that they had full copyright on, and I was mis-attributing and mis-tagging it? Well if the innocent infringer clause doesn't work you're responsible for the fines, regardless of the fact the song you got was tagged public domain. This case is about more than just one person having to pay fines.
"you should probably assume that you have no permissions"
'You should' and 'You have to or you'll be hit with millions of dollars of fines' are two different things. Common sense says to treat music without an attached copyright as fully copyrighted (though that does open up the question of what happens when you get a song tagged with a free copyright type that is simply mis-tagged and should be illegal to copy, then what happens?) but common sense != the law.
Copyrighted and illegal to download are two different things, or more specifically copyrighted + illegal to download doesn't apply to all copyrighted songs. Independent artists and even some major artists release songs for free all the time.
The existence of a single free to download mainstream song renders the argument that 'all mainstream music is illegal to download' invalid, and there's plenty of songs on torrents that are actually legal to download and listen too.
How do you know that? I know of at least two major artists* that have released songs for free download themselves. Did I miss out on getting the 'immediately sense when someone somewhere has claimed copyright to something' sensor when they were being passed out? Or how are you telling the 'free to download' songs from the 'not free to download' songs when both are posted without copyright?
*Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al
Well here in AZ she'd be looking at a fine of about the retail price ($10*number of cd's, let's assume 10 for the sake of argument) and a fine of either $100 or $250 on top of that depending on whether you're a minor or not. So somewhere in the ballpark of $200-$350 dollars if you steal the music from a store, >1 million dollars if you pirate it.
Hmm...I wonder what cd's the borders near my house has...(kidding, kidding :P)
Actually as a petty offense I don't think you can be forced to pay more than $300 for a minor shoplifting incident, like stealing 10 CD's (mind you that's ~120 songs, which is way more than the million dollar fine was for)..
IANAL, just grabbed the info from my state law.
"So, perhaps they mean you can be online an unlimited number of minutes at high speed, but you just aren't allowed to do much."
Well if I hit my bandwidth cap and can't send any more data (assuming that's how the cap works) then I'm no longer online by any definition of the word, so it's not unlimited even by that definition.
"The assumption is that one of them has no cut..."
That's a ridiculous assumption. Cuts are ridiculously common.
Not to mention that your premise is flawed and dangerous. What if the guilty one got a nosebleed on the job? And the innocent one has a small papercut from a week or two ago on the job. Presence of a cut != Guilty in this case.
"Given NASA's experience with writing software that's just gotta work or else, I'd be very hard-pressed to think of no better team of programmers for the job."
You're right! I can't think of a better group of programmers to work on car acceleration issues than the guys who've lost 3 probes to software errors (mariner 1, mars climate orbitor and mars polar lander)!
NASA is not the organization it once was, and implying that their programmers get everything right is not only dangerous, but silly. Everyone makes mistakes, NASA is no exception, and calling them in is more of a PR boost than anything else.
"Almost every single piece of non-trivial software written has bugs"
"dangerous development practices that aren't catching bugs like this."
You can't have it both ways. Accusing Toyota of doing something wrong because a bug like this slipped through and then saying (correctly) that all software has bugs is just a bit silly, you're effectively accusing them of not being perfect...which isn't much of an accusation.
You want truth in the comments? Geez! Next you'll be expecting me to read the articles!
"You know, bathroom locks in most homes and apartments can be opened with a straightened paper clip."
If you used bathroom locks on your front door I wouldn't be surprised if your house got broken into.
Is it still wrong to break into your house? Yeah, but making it far easier to do isn't very smart. If you want to be secure you put a secure lock on your front door, you don't accuse the person breaking in of violating your privacy. Same principal.
I think the GP's point was that spraying this kind of stuff is no different than any other gas attack, and there's already defense against those so rather than use some silly thing like yogurt just use a standard anti-gas measure like a gas mask and covering exposed areas.
I use it for getting directions. I have a horrible memory for names, but a great one for pictures, and so while I can't remember the name of the street I'm supposed to turn on I can remember what the street corner looked like from above on google earth, imagine what it would look like from a perspective on the ground, then see if I've reached that spot yet.
Google Earth is my goto mapping tool because it makes it FAR easier to know if you're going the right way or not if you've seen it, even just from above (though with more and more incorporated street-view you can now see street-level views of most areas).
"If your manuscript does that, eg tests the abilities of a digital camera or is used in psychological testing then I can see that it should be protected by patents as well as copyright."
It's possible to write a compiler that takes any manuscript and converts it into a useful software program. I know for a fact it's possible, because I've seen it done with other pieces of work (the Shakespeare programming language is just one example). So where are you drawing that line then?
To put it another way, give me a copyrighted work, and I'll give you a patentable* piece of machine-code for which it is the source code, which makes it a patentable piece of work. So yes, the line is very blurry.
*In the US at least.
Odd...firefox just autosaves it to the default folder (accidentally ended up bookmarking /. when I was testing looking for the bookmark shortcut and couldn't find it, which was terribly ironic when I later found the bookmark :P).
And how does this judge get his email without pinging/accessing any routers that he hasn't specifically gotten permission to access? Does he use a specific vpn hardcoded to run over a small number of routers to which he has requested and gotten permission (written in triplicate of course) to access? Or does he just break his own ruling everytime he gets a spam message?
Riiight...because putting a bookmark in someone's browser without their approval is so absurdly hard to do that the existence of such a thing is evidence. Don't like this site? Press control-D* to navigate away, or press control-D to win a prize, or press control-D to scan your computer for bad files.
* I'm pretty sure that's IE's shortcut, I don't use IE so I'm not sure, but if it's not replace it with the appropriate shortcut