And yet most 16 year olds can't vote and can get a license.
Increasingly fewer 16 yr olds are getting licenses. In some cases, the minimum age has been increased, in other cases, the restrictions on the licenses no longer allow the 16 (or 17) year old to chaulfer her/his younger sibs so the parents do not have to (so the parents no longer see a reason to pay for driving lessons or higher insurance premiums).
I know, drinking is optional, growing old is not. But if there's a danger to people on the street, there should be a limit on how old you can be and drive, just as there's a limit on how drunk you can be and drive.
Where do you put the limit?
I have one friend in his 30's who lost his license due to too many moving violations. Another in his 90's with a nearfect record. (Though the law where he lives requires him to get a driving exam every two years - actual driving, not just the written exam. He has always scored very high.)
It's not just reliability, but also acceleration. The Titan IV, for example, was capable of launching any payload designed for the shuttle. However, it had a much higher acceleration - too high for human use (except maybe a very experienced test pilot).
What if they compartmentalize Orion a bit more and launch *only* the manned crew portion...
The Orion is the manned crew portion. It is very similar to the Apollo command-module-and-service-module combination. But it is much larger - it can accommodate a crew of 6.
And if you think they're going to make private spaceflight easy to make up for this, you're deluded.
Well, the government did allow Spaceship 1 and its follow X-Prize contenders, but, so far, it doesn't seem inclined to remove the bureaucratic obstacles to getting much beyond that.
Example: The Artemis Project (http://www.asi.org/). Supposedly, the government has not been will to allow anyone to sell them a launch vehicle.
My residential service is nominally 8mbps. According to my ISP's "Summary of Service Features" that means that I get 10mbps for 5 seconds to "enhance my web browsing experience", then it reverts to 8mbps. From actual observation, at non-peak hours, I do get that 5 seconds of 10mbps - after at least 10 seconds of near idle usage. After that 5 seconds, the connection is first throttled back to 8mbps, then continues to throttle lower.
Granted I can get my company to help subsidize that
No one I know (in person), who works from home, has their connection subsidized by their employers - though thrier employers are all to happy to take advantage of the fact they have home connections. Heck, my own employer only has a "Low Bandwidth Business Account". It is only 4mbps, but is never throttled. It also costs 5 times as much as my home connection (10 times (or more) when I switched providers and had a 6 month promotional rate (I have switched provides 5 times, now)).
Sometimes I think I'd rather pay for my usage. It works that way for electricity, water, and cell phones...
Except that then you'd also be paying for all those ads. I suspect that one of the larger reasons ISPs have not switched to metered connections is pressure from the big internet advertising companies.
Entrust here likes to advertise they're 1/7th as expensive as the ones RSA sells
While I do not doubt that RSA's device is way over priced, one seventh the cost still seems to good to be true. Also, FWIIW, I followed a link on Entrust's page and found token that claims to do what Blizzard claims for its US$6.50 token, but for US$5.00.
Also, to me as a user, the single most important thing on my computer would be all my documents, which are accessible from my account.
Unfortunately, for a sandbox to protect these documents will greatly limit the usefulness of applications running in a sand box.
Of course, a web browser or chat client would be least limited. But if you had something legitimate to upload/send, then you are looking at poking holes in the sandbox. With email, even if you never send an attachment, or save a received attachment, it gets complex, because all those messages - and the address book - are valuable to the user. If you keep them in the sandbox, they are open to theft and corruption. If outside the sandbox, you are poking holes, again. Other applications (word processors, drawing tools, etc) have their own legitimate needs for reading/writing files.
Ultimately, it gets down to a choice between protecting the users so much the computer becomes just a fancy TV, or letting the users make mistakes and hope you can afford to defend yourself for failing to protect them.
Could you really trust a Closed Source application where the dev or company behind it wouldn't even pay a small membership fee... ?
Please define "small fee".
At the risk of dating myself, long, long ago, I was interested in creating software for the Mac. While I don't remember what the membership fee was, I do know I couldn't not, at the time, afford both the (annual) membership fee and the cost of the build tools.
While I suspect Apple is currently more friendly to "small" developers than they used to be, how low a fee do really think they would be willing to charge for signing Joe Developer's program?
Consider that signing a 3rd party's code is equivalent of saying "We trust this code". Now how much do you think they would charge?
The issue is: whose interests should the OS serve: the OS maker, the user, or (in the case of malware) anyone who manages to get their code onto the machine?
From the point of view of the OS maker's lawyers. the OS maker.
IANAL, but as I understand the argument, in order to protect the user's interest, the OS must protect itself from the user, just in case he does something stupid, like authorize the installation of a malicious driver. Otherwise, said user might sue the OS maker, claiming "You put code signing in the OS to protect me from malicious code, so why did it not project me?"
And with that said, IS it possible to sign your own drivers for your own Vista machine? I'd very much like to know what is involved in doing that.
I only have an indirect answer: According to the vendors of some of the specialized hardware my clients and I use, the only way to use their hardware under Vista is for them to either get their drivers signed by Microsoft, or for them to rewrite their firmware and DLLs to allow using generic drivers. All of them chose to do the rewrite and use the generic driver. For example, several of the devices we use utilize the FT2232 USB microchip in the hardware. Originally, the vendors licensed the driver source from the manufacturer to make their own custom driver. Now, with the new firmware, the devices appear to Vista as generic USB serial ports (aka COM1, COM2, etc). The new DLLs figure out which serial port really are the special devices and implement new device protocols through the virtual serial ports.
Alternately, you end up with a stack of dongles plugged into your PC. (One of my clients has had to issue its software developers USB hubs to accommodate all the dongles they need.)
Interesting that they would do this. Also, a good thing, if they actualy follow through. As a consultant, I have many clients who paid a lot of money for specialized software tools that are now useless because their publishers have gone out of business, so their license servers went off line.
The deck is stacked against anyone who wants to bring the telecoms to court. Next time it won't be.
Sorry, but read the exceptions sections. The telcos are given a pass to monitor and interfer with traffic as long as the intended purpose is to detect and/or prevent illegal activities.
Even if the retro-active part gets removed, the bill still give the telcos a free ticket to avoid law suits.
Save transcoded copies in addition to the originals ( don't throw away your negatives )
Very good advise. Unless you are transcoding to a lossless codec, the process of transcoding will involve some loss due the different assumptions made in the designs of the various lossy codecs. I.E., once in MP3, leave it in MP3 format if possible, otherwise convert to FLAC, or other lossless, to avoid further content degradation.
To create an ISP, it takes more than a few routers and some fat pipe to some uplink. It's the infamous last mile. And for that last mile, you need the cooperation of a lot of governmental agencies
You also need a willing backbone provider, all of which would also be your competitors. so you'll end up being a vassal of one of them.
Even if you were able to negotiate peerage with other ISPs, most of them are going to be vassals of the big ones.
Much as I would love to see a huge geek co-op raise a new net (Internet III?), I just don't think it is possible anymore.
Net neutrality is really 2 problems. One is an engineering problem related to fairly provisioning QoS. The other is a free speech issue. The second problem arises because companies like AT&T, etc, want to be both carrier and content provider - or at least the service provider for the content providers. Naturally, they want to give preferential service to their own content and/or the content of their (business) customers in terms of delivering content to (consumer) customers. This where government policy is needed - and should be narrowly targetted. The first problem is an engineering problem, best left for engineers to solve - and left alone by the politicians.
Well, where I live - along the border between 2 cities, I have access to 2 cable companies, Wow and Camcast, and AT&T. (There is also stelite broadband, of course, but my neighbors tell me the QoS is bad). There are several companies that resell AT&T DSL, and a few that run there own DSL over lines leased from AT&T, but all of these are dependent on AT&T's infrastructure, so are not really competitors. (I often wonder if AT&T saves money from not having to bill or provide customer support for "indirect subscribers" - just provision circuits and let the "little guys" worry about the rest.)
In my experience, these 3 big ISPs, and their vassels, behave more like a cartel than competitors.
I am dubious of Bluetooth. Have the security issues really been resolved and the fixes correctly implemented?
Also, while wireless keyboards are fine, wireless mice can be a pain to retrieve when dropped. I'd like to see a wireless keyboard with the mouse wired to it.
Otherwise, I found that my laptop is a very good alternative. I just hop on my server through VNC and I control it with my laptop.
I'd just use another laptop and something like PC Anywhere / Go To My PC / Remote Desktop, etc.
(I actually did this once. Surprisingly, it worked. YMMV)
1. Plug in portable hard drive (or equall or greater size)
2. If using NT, Win2000 or XP, tell windows to reformat your *portable* drive as NTFS. (If you're using Vista, I don't think this will work)
3. Boot from a live CD (or DVD) Linux
4. Open a command or terminal window
5. Type: dd if=/dev/sda0 of=/dev/sdb0
To restore:
1. Plug in portable hard drive containing the backup
2. Boot from a live CD (or DVD) Linux
3. Open a command or terminal window
4. Type: dd if=/dev/sdb0 of=/dev/sda0
Slashdot Mirror
And yet most 16 year olds can't vote and can get a license.
Increasingly fewer 16 yr olds are getting licenses. In some cases, the minimum age has been increased, in other cases, the restrictions on the licenses no longer allow the 16 (or 17) year old to chaulfer her/his younger sibs so the parents do not have to (so the parents no longer see a reason to pay for driving lessons or higher insurance premiums).
I know, drinking is optional, growing old is not. But if there's a danger to people on the street, there should be a limit on how old you can be and drive, just as there's a limit on how drunk you can be and drive.
Where do you put the limit?
I have one friend in his 30's who lost his license due to too many moving violations. Another in his 90's with a nearfect record. (Though the law where he lives requires him to get a driving exam every two years - actual driving, not just the written exam. He has always scored very high.)
It's not just reliability, but also acceleration. The Titan IV, for example, was capable of launching any payload designed for the shuttle. However, it had a much higher acceleration - too high for human use (except maybe a very experienced test pilot).
What if they compartmentalize Orion a bit more and launch *only* the manned crew portion...
The Orion is the manned crew portion. It is very similar to the Apollo command-module-and-service-module combination. But it is much larger - it can accommodate a crew of 6.
And if you think they're going to make private spaceflight easy to make up for this, you're deluded.
Well, the government did allow Spaceship 1 and its follow X-Prize contenders, but, so far, it doesn't seem inclined to remove the bureaucratic obstacles to getting much beyond that.
Example: The Artemis Project (http://www.asi.org/). Supposedly, the government has not been will to allow anyone to sell them a launch vehicle.
a ballcap if you're linux (a red one if you're Fedora/RHEL)
Red Felt Fedora
real beer (not that 5% piss) if you're linux
Open Cola
In the age of 20mbps consumer connections....
Where I live, 20mbps is business class service.
My residential service is nominally 8mbps. According to my ISP's "Summary of Service Features" that means that I get 10mbps for 5 seconds to "enhance my web browsing experience", then it reverts to 8mbps. From actual observation, at non-peak hours, I do get that 5 seconds of 10mbps - after at least 10 seconds of near idle usage. After that 5 seconds, the connection is first throttled back to 8mbps, then continues to throttle lower.
Granted I can get my company to help subsidize that
No one I know (in person), who works from home, has their connection subsidized by their employers - though thrier employers are all to happy to take advantage of the fact they have home connections. Heck, my own employer only has a "Low Bandwidth Business Account". It is only 4mbps, but is never throttled. It also costs 5 times as much as my home connection (10 times (or more) when I switched providers and had a 6 month promotional rate (I have switched provides 5 times, now)).
Moreover, isn't there a simple workaround in padding your ssh/scp packets and adding a random 10% chance of +1-25ms delay between packets?
The extra random delay might help a little, but adding padding would just make it more likely to get flagged for throttling.
Sometimes I think I'd rather pay for my usage. It works that way for electricity, water, and cell phones...
Except that then you'd also be paying for all those ads. I suspect that one of the larger reasons ISPs have not switched to metered connections is pressure from the big internet advertising companies.
Entrust here likes to advertise they're 1/7th as expensive as the ones RSA sells
While I do not doubt that RSA's device is way over priced, one seventh the cost still seems to good to be true. Also, FWIIW, I followed a link on Entrust's page and found token that claims to do what Blizzard claims for its US$6.50 token, but for US$5.00.
Unfortunately, for a sandbox to protect these documents will greatly limit the usefulness of applications running in a sand box.
Of course, a web browser or chat client would be least limited. But if you had something legitimate to upload/send, then you are looking at poking holes in the sandbox. With email, even if you never send an attachment, or save a received attachment, it gets complex, because all those messages - and the address book - are valuable to the user. If you keep them in the sandbox, they are open to theft and corruption. If outside the sandbox, you are poking holes, again. Other applications (word processors, drawing tools, etc) have their own legitimate needs for reading/writing files.
Ultimately, it gets down to a choice between protecting the users so much the computer becomes just a fancy TV, or letting the users make mistakes and hope you can afford to defend yourself for failing to protect them.
Please define "small fee".
At the risk of dating myself, long, long ago, I was interested in creating software for the Mac. While I don't remember what the membership fee was, I do know I couldn't not, at the time, afford both the (annual) membership fee and the cost of the build tools.
While I suspect Apple is currently more friendly to "small" developers than they used to be, how low a fee do really think they would be willing to charge for signing Joe Developer's program?
Consider that signing a 3rd party's code is equivalent of saying "We trust this code". Now how much do you think they would charge?
From the point of view of the OS maker's lawyers. the OS maker.
IANAL, but as I understand the argument, in order to protect the user's interest, the OS must protect itself from the user, just in case he does something stupid, like authorize the installation of a malicious driver. Otherwise, said user might sue the OS maker, claiming "You put code signing in the OS to protect me from malicious code, so why did it not project me?"
I only have an indirect answer: According to the vendors of some of the specialized hardware my clients and I use, the only way to use their hardware under Vista is for them to either get their drivers signed by Microsoft, or for them to rewrite their firmware and DLLs to allow using generic drivers. All of them chose to do the rewrite and use the generic driver. For example, several of the devices we use utilize the FT2232 USB microchip in the hardware. Originally, the vendors licensed the driver source from the manufacturer to make their own custom driver. Now, with the new firmware, the devices appear to Vista as generic USB serial ports (aka COM1, COM2, etc). The new DLLs figure out which serial port really are the special devices and implement new device protocols through the virtual serial ports.
Alternately, you end up with a stack of dongles plugged into your PC. (One of my clients has had to issue its software developers USB hubs to accommodate all the dongles they need.)
Interesting that they would do this. Also, a good thing, if they actualy follow through. As a consultant, I have many clients who paid a lot of money for specialized software tools that are now useless because their publishers have gone out of business, so their license servers went off line.
The May issue of Circuit Cellar (http://circuitcellar.com) wrapped up a 3 part series on installing a solar electric system.
Sorry, but read the exceptions sections. The telcos are given a pass to monitor and interfer with traffic as long as the intended purpose is to detect and/or prevent illegal activities.
Even if the retro-active part gets removed, the bill still give the telcos a free ticket to avoid law suits.
Very good advise. Unless you are transcoding to a lossless codec, the process of transcoding will involve some loss due the different assumptions made in the designs of the various lossy codecs. I.E., once in MP3, leave it in MP3 format if possible, otherwise convert to FLAC, or other lossless, to avoid further content degradation.
You also need a willing backbone provider, all of which would also be your competitors. so you'll end up being a vassal of one of them.
Even if you were able to negotiate peerage with other ISPs, most of them are going to be vassals of the big ones.
Much as I would love to see a huge geek co-op raise a new net (Internet III?), I just don't think it is possible anymore.
Net neutrality is really 2 problems. One is an engineering problem related to fairly provisioning QoS. The other is a free speech issue. The second problem arises because companies like AT&T, etc, want to be both carrier and content provider - or at least the service provider for the content providers. Naturally, they want to give preferential service to their own content and/or the content of their (business) customers in terms of delivering content to (consumer) customers. This where government policy is needed - and should be narrowly targetted. The first problem is an engineering problem, best left for engineers to solve - and left alone by the politicians.
Well, where I live - along the border between 2 cities, I have access to 2 cable companies, Wow and Camcast, and AT&T. (There is also stelite broadband, of course, but my neighbors tell me the QoS is bad). There are several companies that resell AT&T DSL, and a few that run there own DSL over lines leased from AT&T, but all of these are dependent on AT&T's infrastructure, so are not really competitors. (I often wonder if AT&T saves money from not having to bill or provide customer support for "indirect subscribers" - just provision circuits and let the "little guys" worry about the rest.) In my experience, these 3 big ISPs, and their vassels, behave more like a cartel than competitors.
I am dubious of Bluetooth. Have the security issues really been resolved and the fixes correctly implemented? Also, while wireless keyboards are fine, wireless mice can be a pain to retrieve when dropped. I'd like to see a wireless keyboard with the mouse wired to it.
I'd just use another laptop and something like PC Anywhere / Go To My PC / Remote Desktop, etc.
Something I have used to control multiple PCs from a single keyboard and mouse is http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2/
I have found it very useful and responsive. Besides controlling, it also enables you to copy and paste text between PCs, even running different OSs.
(I actually did this once. Surprisingly, it worked. YMMV)
1. Plug in portable hard drive (or equall or greater size)
2. If using NT, Win2000 or XP, tell windows to reformat your *portable* drive as NTFS. (If you're using Vista, I don't think this will work)
3. Boot from a live CD (or DVD) Linux
4. Open a command or terminal window
5. Type: dd if=/dev/sda0 of=/dev/sdb0
To restore:
1. Plug in portable hard drive containing the backup
2. Boot from a live CD (or DVD) Linux
3. Open a command or terminal window
4. Type: dd if=/dev/sdb0 of=/dev/sda0