tsally

In regards to AV Comparatives, I responded to why their tests aren't relevant in in the real world here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284321. The bottom line is that detection rates as high as 97% are generally regarded by industry experts as inflated (John Viega says in one of his books that some people estimate actual detection rates to be around 30%). AV companies themselves would never use that number as a part of their marketing campaigns. You'll note that on the product pages of the AV products tested, the numbers aren't listed. If a 99.6% detection rate was actually. valid, don't you think it would be displayed in large and bold letters on the product page?

I'm not saying people shouldn't run AV, but we need to be honest about the actual capabilities of these products. Even if actual detection is only 30%, 30% is better than 0%.

* the task manager

* Quicken

* ATI Drivers

* the GIMP

* other antivirus programs (including products from Kaspery, ESET, Avast, and Trend Micro)

* VLC

* Cygwin

* Acrobat reader

* text editors (including Notepad2 and Notepad++)

* TrueCrypt

AV run in the real world on these settings would be disastrous.

Issues with the samples used by AV Comparatives:

* The malware sample size is only around 1 million.

* The sample size of clean programs is far too small.

* The malware samples used aren't public. We don't even know if the malware used by AV Comparatives are found in the wild anymore.

More generally, evaluations like those done by AV Comparatives and similar organizations are misleading. What actually matters is the vulnerability window. This window is generally a week or two and occurs after a piece of malware is released into the wild. It is the amount of time it takes AV vendors to get a signature distributed. Most damage is done during the vulnerability window, during which infected machines will have their AV disabled by the virus. The fact that your AV can detect viruses released years ago actually doesn't have any bearing on your security; it's a meaningless evaluation of the product.

You have to ask yourself, why don't AV vendors report numbers like the percentages found in AV Comparatives? They don't because they know it's bogus. Sure, most AV vendors will list AV Comparatives and others as an "award" or a "certification", but they'll never list the actual number. I think that should tell you something. In the real world no one is experiencing detection rates like those in the report. If they were, you can be sure the numbers would be part of an AV marketing campaign.

For non technical people reading this thread, the general sentiment of other commentators is correct. Most AV is garbage. It will protect you from about a 1/3 of what is out there at the cost of computer performance. Make an educated decision about whether to run it at home or not. On your corporate network, do whatever your security guy tells you to do.

If you have credible evidence that Guo was a violent, extremist terrorist funded by the West, I'd love to see it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_People%27s_...

More specifically:

"On 17 Oct 2009, Reuters reported that Guo Quan a professor in Nanjing Teachers University was sentenced to 10 years in jail for "inciting Subversion" of Government. There are more than 40 people in jail for criticizing the government."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_People%27s_...

Threatening to provide or actually providing uncensored search results to the public could certainly be construed as inciting subversion.

There's no proving or disproving points here, as you seem to think. It is a valid belief that ethically the name of the engineer should not have been reported. You might not share this belief, but it is a valid belief to have and it cannot be disproved. Your ethics are simply different.

So I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make.

The other part of your bad experience comes from the fact that your instructor was a poor educator. Grading solely based on the instructor's interpretation of the work is the canonical teaching mistake in English. Of course, having a bad instructor will make any course a bad experience, regardless of the discipline.

It's unfortunate your experience was so terrible because I find English to be very worthwhile. I've taken some of the most advanced undergraduate CS courses in the country and they were very worthwhile. Yet AP Engish senior year in high school and one English course in college match the CS courses in terms of being worthwhile.

I think it's best to clarify what I mean by worthwhile. One worthwhile moment in Computer Science was when I finally understood Lisp macros. Another one was when I understood Turing Machines. I'd say I've had about 5 or 6 of these moments over the past few years in CS. These are moments where you feel like you understand something in a fundamentally different and higher way. English produces similar moments, but they are about the world at large instead of just a technical field. Taking one English course per semester has netted me one or two worthwhile moments a month. It's really quite something.

If you're ever given the opportunity, I urge you to give literature another try. It's difficult to find a competent teacher, but it's worth the effort.

In the moment of the firefight it was unclear whether the van was armed or not. Was was clear to the soldiers was that the van responded very quickly to a group of wounded people who had several confirmed weapons among them. Also, as others have mentioned, the soldiers knew the insurgency has used similar tactics in the past to salvage weapons and ammo.

Do you have a basis for your opinion, or are you just making things up?

Actually, I already know the answer to that question. The average age of all active duty military is 28. 37% of the Marine Corps is between the ages of 17 and 21 [1]. And when you remove all the higher ranking officers (who are not very likely to be gunning for an Apache), the average age gets even lower.

Based on this poll [2], it appears the average age of HN is between 21 and 35. The data from the HN survey appears to have been taken down; that would give a much better answer. Regardless, your wrong in saying the average reader of this forum is probably younger than the military personal flying the helicopter. At best you can say it's unclear.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/pastinson/us-military-active-duty-...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=800158

EDIT: For the record, the parent post contains 100% factually incorrect information and this post contains a refutation with cited facts. Currently the voting split is 9/-1. This is an emotional issue, but let's try and not be so reactionary.

EDIT2: The parent is factually correct because waterlesscloud is referring to the age of the pilot, whereas I thought we were talking about the gunner (the person whose actions are in question). I also assumed the marines were involved, which is also incorrect. Sorry for the false accusation.

Your analysis strikes me as a bit glib.

There are two critical pieces to this issue and I think it is important we distinguish between the two. The first part (which is what you are trying to get at) is that the prospect of warfare being conducted through a video-game like interface is scary and feels wrong. I agree and I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. Imagine soldiers driving to work in the morning from their homes in the suburbs, putting in a 9-5 day piloting a drone killing insurgents, and then going home to their families in time for dinner. Very scary.

However, the second part is what you miss. These military personnel are kids. Kids that we ask to conduct a large scale invasion and then engage in the near-impossible task of nation building. As Thomas Barnett says, the same 19 year old just can't do it all. These kids should have been out of Iraq after we captured Saddam. They aren't psychologically equipped to deal with a country post-invasion. This video is a perfect example of that. Notice how the kid mistakes a camera for a weapon and is extremely jumpy when he is trying to figure out whether he is being shot at. He's never been trained to deal with this kind of situation (urban warfare, enemies without uniforms, civilians intermixed with soldiers) and it's criminal we force teenagers make these kinds of decisions every day.

All of that said, clearly bad decisions were made in this video. I'm not disputing that. But there are two crimes in this video.

I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point expending any more energy on this issue wasted effort since you seem dead set in your ways.

[1] http://www.gregpalast.com/no-childs-behind-left/

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461

[3] http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/10/private-school-tuition-1...

Yes I do. It's called the United States Postal Service. It was founded in 1775. Given its track record, I think the government could implement a digital system that will be good for another couple hundred years.

Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.

The public sector has its share of successes as well. How about the postal service, the census, and national elections? The US government has been handling large scale projects since the 1700s.

And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.

Hrm, well lets think about what happened when we privatized part of our elections (Diebold) or our defense (Blackwater). Let's compare that to the USPS which has been running successfully for over 2.5 centuries. Damn right the government can handle some problems better than the private sector. Diebold is an gross embarrassment to this country and you're fooling yourself if you think similar things wouldn't happen with a privatized postal service. The government doesn't need to have a technically superior product to Gmail, just as the USPS doesn't need to have a superior product to UPS (hint: UPS is better). The government simply needs to provide a reliable, stable service with the privacy and civil guarantees that can only be provided by a public entity. The government cares about integrity. Diebold cares about profits, and look where that got us. Untraceable election fraud in the world's most powerful democracy.

See the issue? The priority in the private system is on making profit and providing diplomas to people. The priority in the public system is on actual learning. The rampant grade inflation at Ivy League schools is a great example of learning taking a back seat in favor of producing graduates that look good on paper.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that "public" universities are any better. At my university (UIUC), research grants account for the vast majority of the funding for the engineering college. Consequently, research is the priority, not the education of the students. Simply put, the priority is where the money is. If the money is tied to the learning of the students, the students will actually learn. If it's tied to producing diplomas or publications, that's where the priority will be placed. UIUC can get away with it because its engineering graduates are still extremely highly paid. The prestige of UIUC's faculty is responsible for that, but it would be erroneous to attribute it to the educational curriculum. I can tell you from personal experience that the vast majority of graduates are average programmers at best and many haven't really internalized essential CS skills like algorithms, data structures, etc. One example that really sticks out in my mind: I went to a talk by Alan Kay last semester. Hardly any undergraduates attend, or even know or care who Alan Kay is. Alan puts up a few slides with pictures of McCarthy, Sutherland, Church, etc. Not a single undergraduate can name their primary contributions to the field. No one even knew the importance of Lisp! As Alan aptly put it, "you all are lucky your field isn't Physics; if it were you would be kicked out of the department and sent back to high school for not knowing the fundamentals of past research" (paraphrasing).

So why doesn't your grocery store example hold up? The success of a grocery store is strongly coupled to the quality of its product. Spoiled food is spoiled food. Education? Turns out the diploma, not learning, is what matters the most. The USPS is a similar situation, true value of the service (essentially free communication for all citizens everywhere) is only loosely coupled with the financial success of the service.

So if you believe that this sort of communication is a fundamental right for all citizens, than the service needs to be provided by the public sector. It's impossible to build a profitable business in the private sector out of it.

No, mail is not the fundamental component I've identified. As I said, the fundamental component is: "the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country".

If we haven't quite reached that point yet, can't you see we will?

Oh, we'll get there. I think it's high time the USPS started providing free email accounts to every United States citizen with no advertisements. The USPS can provide privacy guarantees for the data on their servers that private companies cannot offer. Plus, imagine the optimizations that would be possible in business and government methodologies if every US citizen was guaranteed to have an email address. Hell, in this day and age I'm far less likely to change my email address than my mailing address. If I had a government issued email, it would never change.

On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.

As a rule of thumb, if your gut tells you that a particular service is essential to a civilized society the service belongs in the public sector. As a nation we've decided the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country is such a service. Education is another. These two examples are extraordinarily complex problems which the US public sector solves well, all things considered. Yet every time we discuss these services someone always wants to privatize them.

For the most fundamental components of our society, privatization is never the answer.

The arguments you provide may justify the existence of some patents, but certainly not this one.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE62F5YR20100316

No, I'm not forced to buy and use a Kindle (a rather facetious question). I'm not forced to buy and use teflon-coated bullets either. That doesn't change the fact that these two items which currently are legal have properties that I believe are immoral and illegal. Current law (specifically Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution [1] and the Federal ban against armor piercing ammunition [2]) suggests that certain properties of these items are legal only because of technicalities. I can advocate against these items even if I am not forced to buy them. A rather basic and reasonable claim on my part, if you ask me.

How exactly are freedom of the press or speech in danger?

If society is saturated with items that allow companies or governments to take away natural rights, then these rights are in danger. Just because these items haven't achieved full saturation yet doesn't mean we shouldn't be protesting them now.

The Internet pretty much has stopped any one governing body from taking that right away from anyone. In fact, it's destroying many newspapers.

Apparently not, given the Chinese government's success in censoring the internet there.

[1] http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8

[2] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/921.html#a_17

No one is crying here. It's a serious issue.

...yet you offer no solution for copyright holders to protect their works.

First, it's not clear they need protection. In 2009 movie revenues reached an all time high, despite 2009 being the year of the pirate.

Second, copyright holders can protect their works by making the legitimate version more valuable than the pirated one. DRM is an attempt to get around this basic economic reality. Valve and Apple are examples of companies that understand this. Other companies should use Steam and iTunes as the gold standard for content distribution. DRM isn't what makes Steam and iTunes successful, it's that the distribution mechanism is convenient, quick, and social.

Third, it is illegal for copyright holders to protect their copyrights by taking away the rights of citizens. Copyright is not a natural right and enforcement via rights restrictions is not in the purview of private entities. The government grants and protects copyright if and only if such granting and protection "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts" [Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, the US Constitution]. It's up to the government to decide what rights can be restricted to protect copyright and if such restrictions benefit the people at large. Personally I think DRM for the purpose of copyright enforcement developed by private entities is unconstitutional. Congress and Congress alone mandates the protections on copyright.

Authors wouldn't need to resort to this if mass e-book piracy didn't exist.

I don't really think this statement needs refutation. Let me phrase your statement another way: "law enforcement wouldn't need to resort to wiretapping every phone in America if crime didn't exist".

Don't blame Amazon for something the government has been doing for many years.

Well first of all it was a hypothetical. But I can and will blame companies for such behavior. Do you know how much money Cisco made from the Great Firewall? Companies that enable human rights violations share some responsibility. I'll blame the construction companies that provided materials to build the concentration camps too.

Note that I'm not against other systems of government, just systems of government that systematically violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (of which the US is an author and signatory). I don't think US companies should do business with such governments.