Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
It always makes sense to look for cheaper alternatives, that's part of how you drive productivity. What doesn't make sense is mandating changes when it is still be best option available at the current price point and you cannot foresee any workable alternatives.
Even the oil isn't running out. Back in the mid 70s we "only had 70 years of oil at current consumption rates." Last time I checked current consumption rates have increased every year, even in countries where the rate of increase was falling. And we still have 70 years worth of oil left. So maybe "70 years of oil" is one of those magic economic numbers: given current money it is all we bother to calculate. Sort of like when I was in college and the price of a pizza was always a dollar a slice when we ordered because none of us had quarters to make change. Sometimes this was a felicitous happenstance for the delivery person, but not usually.
And the premises were flawed from the get go.
Use of the Mechanical Turk and linking the study to CMU both biased the study, especially as it was an actual CMU study. While I am not specifically familiar with Mechanical Turk, since it is on Amazon the assumption is that somebody with a hell of a lot more resources than I have has already scanned the applet for malware and passed it as legitimate. Failure to mention the study on any CMU website is also pretty meaningless. It's not the sort of thing you'd expect to find on their websites, or if it is, it will be so buried it is difficult to find.
The bit about the UAC is a complete red herring. The UAC is only useful for drive-by malware. If you've downloaded it, you know it is going to pop up, and you know you're going to have to authorize it.
If the program was even minimally well behaved, there's no cause to look further for malicious activity. The reality of the security situation right now is that you pick your preferred suite, install it, and count on them to detect the malware. So unless they were providing their code to the AV vendors for inclusion in the malware signatures, there's no cause for a typical user to question the applet.
To get even a semblance of reality into this study they need to have a new name, release it through typical malware vectors (that is not Amazon, Chrome, or Apple app stores but possible dodgy sites or banner ads displayed on random web pages) including some drive-by installers. Collect the data from those instances and see what the results are.
Perhaps we can learn from one of the most advanced, most enlightened, highly educated societies in the world.
Perhaps you should read more Orwell:
Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history2 etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwell-s-letter-on-why-he-wrote-1984.html (not much commentary, mostly just Orwell's letter on the subject)
I didn't like reading 1984 and I haven't read much else by him. But I at least am aware of his primary tenets and don't try to re-write them.
that's funny, because in my reading Orwell references Hitler and the Spanish Civil War more than he ever referenced Russia. And he noted frequently that it was written for the UK and America because he did not think we are as naturally immune to fascist thinking as we too often suppose.
While it is true that Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946, it is also true that he was on his way out of politics even as he made that speech. So no, Stalinist Russia was not the model for 1984. Rather even though Orwell fancied himself a democratic socialist, he was drawing on what he knew of socialism in all of its various forms as it had been practiced in and around him.
No, it's not. The basic social contract for government is that it protects its people from even greater aggressive threats than the government induces.
I'm not talking ethics/philosophy. On that basis I concur with the Founders. But you have to realize what the Brits started in 1215 and which we on this side of the pond set out more forthrightly in 1776 is a very, very rare occurrence in history. China, far older than either of our countries has NEVER been ruled on this concept. It may be that India is now approaching the concept. But even while under British colonial rule I don't think it is quite accurate to characterize it that way. Russia has never been ruled that way. Rome kind of sort of ruled that way for about 200 years of its 1000 year history but the rest was the epitome of the contract I am noting as the basic social contract. And such a thought would have been purest blasphemy in medieval times.
No, tyranny is the basic social contract throughout history. And the peasants just hope to have enough grain left for their families after the Cossacks have left.
That depends on exactly what you mean by "spied upon."
Let's assume for a moment that the US government is hoovering up all data that passes through any all of the big internet hubs in the US and western-friendly countries plus a few in unfriendly countries where they've managed to plant malware (including possible physical devices). Let's also assume they are hoovering up all radio data across the globe 24/7/365.25. Let's assume they can scan all mail sent via the post office and read it without opening it. And that they scan all voice calls that aren't digital.
Doesn't "spying on" imply that somewhere there is a human that sees the data? How can any small number of people read that much data? Because as soon as you put an algorithm on it which kicks out a group of people as "low probability of ____" you're not looking at their data even if it was collected. And you have to put a hell of a lot of filters on the data before you can get down to the point where even with 10,000 agents you are looking at some significant portion of information about the general public.
So what we get down to isn't the massive spying. The real question is: are the filters only being used to control truly bad actors? We all agree we need to control bad actors right? Bad actors of the sort who kill a couple of thousand at a pop without batting an eye lash. Because if we can't agree on that point, we are in an ideological war that will only end with total victory over the enemy.
My only quibble is with worrying over differentiating Bolshevists for other flavors of commie. It's all from the same rotten tree. Only the Progs worry about it. I think it has too much in common with the Emo Phillips skit about religion:
http://splitframeofreference.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-greatest-religious-joke-of-all-time.html
Link leaves out a good chunk of the monologue, but gets the key bits.
As a 'Merkin, I do too. The site should be primary with Hanks as secondary, letters as appropriate to both before filing in court. I expect Hanks to settle quickly which should expedite rolling over the website. And yes, he should apply for the enhanced penalties since they slapped a false copyright on it.
FB doesn't have the oodles of streaming data that Netflix does. YouTube certainly would, but now that Google own them it would be imprudent to sue or worse try such tactics on them. First off, it's never a good idea to sue someone who can print money (effectively). And who can say what minor tweaks to algorithms might do to your search status.
I never had a problem with metered billing when I had a CompuServe membership. Never bought one for AOL. CompuServe's interface might have been obscure, but AOL always looked cartoony.
I read the headline and thought 'Great! About time too!' And then I read the article and discovered it is nothing of the sort. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The states are quite right when they prohibit politicians from diverting public monies to what would otherwise would be commercially viable enterprises. Where they go wrong is when they corrupt those enterprises by creating monopoly conditions via restrictive regulation. The FCC would be within its delegated powers and the Constitution if they came down on those states that enable the monopolies. But turning the state into the monopoly is even worse than what we have now.
If the people of an area want to setup non-governmental NPOs for internet service, I'm fine with that. But it cannot be the state directly, which is what this jackalope is trumpeting.
That horse is gone, dead, and his carcass cleaned by the buzzards ages ago. It died way back in The Great Depression when SCOTUS ruled that a farmer growing corn to feed to his chickens ran afoul of one of FDR's socialist "you can't grow that without government permission" laws.
No, it's not. Go back and read the article again. They are fighting it because the judge conflated a subpoena and a warrant. The entire case is being brought under US Constitutional law, specifically the 4th amendment.
If they were going to fight it on the grounds you suggest they would have to get the EU Court dismissal and then come back to the US and claim the ruling was binding on them via Treaty. Not sure how well that would work because I'm not sure which Treaties you'd need to reference.
I'd say there are multiple vectors on the whole "don't get it" thing:
- failure to produce entertaining material.
- failure to produce original material.
- failure to set reasonable prices.
- failure to stay in their lane. (Hollywood should be focused on entertaining us, not selecting our next world leaders.)
On one level, I get the impetus to reset Star Trek. Since Roddenberry launched Next Gen the studios have made a hash of his universe, especially with Enterprise which should have been a far more interesting show than it was.
What I couldn't stand was their mechanism for doing so. It's one thing for Dr. Who to be all timey-whimey -- that's been inherent in the show since it inception even if it has been exacerbated a bit lately -- it a whole other thing when it moves to Star Trek. I find it's a lot like ozone - you want a good layer of it in the stratosphere, but not at ground level.
Any time someone with billions of dollars bribes pays a government official to change a law so his particular firm industry can make more money than they otherwise would, it is crony capitalism.
Flat tax rates for everyone, or it's just a different form of graft.
Mind you, I won't hold it against Disney for getting you to roll over for them. That's your fault. And if I were the CEO of Disney and you were willing to roll over for me, I'd be remiss in not taking advantage of it for my shareholders.
That's what you mean. That's how I read it. But I'll grant the point of our counterparts on this thread that this is not necessarily what the pointy-headed politicians mean when they say it. Mostly because no matter how rigorous the training or how much time was spent teaching them to code/program, they are the ones who were mostly likely to fail the course.
No, but everyone should have been exposed to music composition, screen writing, and acting.
And oddly enough, most of us are exposed to screen writing and acting via English class in the US. Some Victorian age dude who goes by the name of William. They tell me you should have heard of him.
Yes and no.
Particularly for English speaking people I think it should be compulsory to the point that you can correctly conjugate the major word groups and translate between the two. Two years should be sufficient. The catch is, those two years should be fairly early in school. My own exposure started in the 9th grade which was a bit late. I'd say 6th would have been better. The rigorous translation exercises taught me more about how and why English works than my English classes did. Yes, I know English more of a Germanic language, but it worked. I suppose you could do the same with German. I'd give the edge to Latin since it leads to 4 other languages.
Beyond those two years it should be optional.
Another is the exact definition of coding.
I was taught "coding" in high school and took an intro class in college. I might have taken the intermediate class except the class was designated as the weed out class for CS majors. They intentionally gave you more work than an person could actually accomplish to force 4 out of 5 students to drop out. I learned a lot from my geometry/probability and statistics teacher under informal instruction, a bit from the formal high school class, and a tad more in college. I am not now and have never programmed as a paid job. The languages in which I learned were BASIC and PCL. I've heard of all the professional languages and once put together a rudimentary FORTAN program for a physics class because the prof thought we should all do at least one FORTRAN program.
Was I taught coding? Was it useful?
I certainly haven't learned it to the level Torvalds has. Maybe to the level some others here have.I still don't quite grasp Snell's sort, but with a reference could easily include it in a program. Never quite grokked the whole two's complement method of subtraction on the CPU, but I accept that it works. It was certainly useful. Certain limitations of computers became clear. Some lines of algorithmic thinking were clarified.
If you can't just tick the box in the compliance statement, it ain't getting deployed here bub.
Sure, in theory you can audit the code, but most places don't have a stable of world class security boffins available to work on that. Which means you need traceability to known trusted sources. Anonymous places on the interwebs don't make that cut.
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