Delta did too, at least on my flight from Atlanta to Vegas.
I don't know why the hell anyone would put up with not having that, considering it clearly costs the airline about 15 cents a seat, and they would only ever remove it in an attempt to overcharge people for stuff.
Neither the TSA nor the cops work for the airlines. It is not some private business attempting to deny someone access to them, it is the government attempting to deny a person access to a business.
Look, businesses can refuse service to people on almost any grounds. A bar could, for example, kick someone out because they are carrying a musical instrument. Entirely legal for them to do. They don't have to justify it in anyway, they can stand there and say 'People with trombones cannot drink here'. 'People holding musical instruments' is not a protected class under the law, and business can refuse service to all those people generally, or in any specific case they want.
But that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that the bar has no problem with trombonists, but the police are standing in the road barring someone with a big box trying to enter to a bar, because the town has passed a law against playing music in bars, and he might have a musical instrument in there. No warrant, no judicial order, he just looks like a musician so they keep him out unless he lets them search his stuff.
And idiots like you are standing up for some hypothetical right of a business to refuse service to him, which isn't even slightly the issue here. In fact, if anything, the rights of businesses to do business with anyone they choose is being infringed. (Just like in some places with segregation, where it often was mandated by law in specific cases, even if the business did not want to participate.)
The key here is that flying isn't a basic human right. Those airplanes are privately owned,
The airport, however, is public property. Including the terminals beyond the security area.
I have a perfect right to be in that area, without any of their 'security' crap. I even have a ticket, if for some reason they're requiring me to have completed a private transaction with some third party before letting me onto that public property.
The government don't have a right to search me before walking around what is essentially a publicly owned mall. If any of the businesses in said mall want me to submit to a search before entering them, be it a Borders bookstore or a Delta airplane, that is entirely the businesses' right.
But it is not the right of the government to mandate that I be searched, without a warrant, and then do it themselves. (And then have have people somehow claiming this has anything to do with the rights of private businesses.)
Um, actually, no victim of a carbombing who's actually in the car when it explodes has any reasonable chance of surviving, so I have no idea what distinction you're trying to make here. For someone to survive, the bomb either has to go off prematurely, or not at all, either of which could conceivable happen with airplane bombs.(For example, the shoe bomber's bomb didn't go off.)
Nor do I think that distinction would make any difference even if it was true. 'Oh, hey, if your car explodes you randomly have a 10% chance of surviving, so that's not a security concern.'
And how would that be hard to get that much on a plane? It would just take a dozen people buying tickets.
Not actually getting on the plane, mind you. Just buying tickets on some flight, not even the one they're going to blow up, to get through security.
Or they could even print fake tickets to get through security. You can't get on a plane with a fake ticket, but you can get through security just fine, as they don't actually check that your home-printed ticket is actually legit. As has been repeatedly pointed out. (You could even use people flying in to transport the stuff.)
And then they all sit down next to each other at some terminal at the back of the airport, and pass their little baggies to each other. You can think of less noticeable and more convoluted schemes to pass stuff to each other, but, frankly, most waiting areas at airports have seats that face 'backwards' away from any possible onlookers, so really just having them sit next to each other would work. (And you pass clothing backwards.)
Anyone who thinks this is suspicious has never observed their own behavior at an airport. The very first thing anyone does after sitting down at their terminal is to rearrange their bags (Which were organized weird for security, and now need to be organized for the plane.), often trading items with people who are in their group.
The last collector then purchases some bottled water, goes to the bathroom, pours it out, and sits on the toilet for ten minutes putting it all together. (If it's a binary explosive, have one guy collect one side, and another guy collect the other, and put it together, and then one person does one more handoff.)
Meanwhile, all but that person walk happily out of the airport, or, heck, get on their flight.
Anyone who can't figure out how to get 2 two liters amounts of any liquid, together, behind airport security, is a moron. It's trivially easy. (Although it'd end up being in a plastic bag or something, not a two liter bottle, as those are hard to find at airports, and suspicious for security. 'Luckily', we're supposed to take liter plastic bags through security, and having more than one isn't suspicious.)
Yes, whitehouse.gov is a very attacked site, for all sorts of reasons, and I bet it will be the very first place to try out any new Drupal vulnerability, and at least one of those will succeed sometime in the next couple of years.
But, um...who cares if it does? It's not a mission critical web site. It's stupid fluff pieces about the president and his initiatives. If something goes wrong it gets flipped offline, restored from backup, patched, and brought back online.
It's interesting to see the government try OSS, and that might be an interesting discussion, but way too many people(1) here instantly leapt to the non-existence security implications, acting like important government computers were going to be exposed via any security issues in Drupal.
1) And half the remaining people appear to be morons talking about how CMS are useless. They haven't realized that stating 'people don't need CMSes' doesn't, like they think, show that they're some elite HTML coder, it just reveals them as someone who's never been hired to make a web site for someone else who then can add and remove content.
Because he's a moron who doesn't understand how CMSes are actually used in the real world, and thinks the only point of them is for 'dynamic' content.
When in actual fact something like half of all CMS sites are mostly 'static', with maybe a forum and an RSS feed block being their sole 'automatically changing' area, and then rest is so that people who don't know a hell of a lot about web sites can fricking manage the site, or at least their area of it, and add and remove content.
Unless, unlike Windows, they haven't been trained into constantly downloading and installing things.
That, right there, that mindset, is the only way to keep computers safe...having people know that the way to install things is to launch the 'application manager' and have a nice interface come up with all the applications they can install.
This should not prompt for a password in any way, either. If on a computer set up as a single user the user wants to install or remove openoffice from it, they should be able to to just do so.
Likewise, a URL scheme to 'add a repository' should be created, so users can click on links in web pages launch the application manager, and check to make sure the repository is one of the known-good third party ones (Which should be easy to register for, but would still create a rather large barrier for malware.) and add it and open it.
And all this should be totally unable to access any system software at all, which would need a root password to install or uninstall, and which users should never need to use.
Get people doing this, have people know that this is how you install programs, you don't download things and then double click on them and enter a password, and you've removed most of the idiocy of manual virus infections. Don't even let them do that. Luckily, programs download with incorrect permissions, but don't let them do it to.deb or.rpm either...the thing they should download is a URL of a repository, which gets checked before being used with a master list of known good ones, and which they cannot click 'okay', or even enter a root password, to use if it's not on the list. (Instead, they have to go do a bunch of manual steps, so that software distributors don't have them do that.)
Likewise, almost all system settings, like configuring the network, should not require root privs, unless someone's specially set it that way. Make it where people think having to enter a root password is a weird thing they have to do when changing their antivirus or upgrading to the next version of their OS, not something they need to do when installing Flash.
I think we're spending way too much time trying to 'cool' things that do not, in fact, need to be cooler than outside. Nowhere on earth is so hot that servers won't run, unless you've built a server room over an active volcano or something.
All we actually need to do is remove the heat from the servers to the air, and then keep swapping the air with the outside.
Which happens automatically if you let heat out the top and air in the bottom. Even if you have to condition the incoming air to remove moisture, that's cheaper than actually 'cooling' AC. So the second part, replacing the room air, is easy.
As for the first, I've always wondered why they don't use chimney-like devices to generate wind naturally and send it though server racks, instead of fans. I think all the heat in a server room could actually, on exit, suck incoming air in fast enough to cool computers if it actually hit the right places on the way in.
Heck, this would apply anyway. Instead of having AC vent into server rooms, why not have AC vent into server racks? Hook up the damn AC to the fan vent on each server, blow cold air straight in. The room itself could end not cold at all.
They couldn't play normal WoW, because of the lag.
I am assuming that this 'trip' will correctly simulate speed-of-light delay, right? And bandwidth issues?
From what I can tell, they're not simulating the technical aspects of the trip, just 'locked up for 17 months', just the social ones, but hopefully they're doing that. (And even stuff like 'Okay, today we made it to Mars, so you're going to have to run around like madmen for a few hours pushing whatever button we light up to simulate the stress and work of landing')
They could, however, have computer lan with servers specifically set up for gaming. And both multiplayer and single player games. Oh, and give them a mirror of wikipedia.
From what I understand, sending from spacecraft is a power issue, and attempting to build low power transmitters is why we always have problems in that regard. But sending to them isn't an issue at all, especially if we're willing to only contact them 15% of the time, we can put a big honking transmitter on ISS or something. So we could even send them new games and stuff.
I understand why some people care about the year, but to me it's never seemed important.
Likewise, I don't have anywhere near enough artists have to divide them by first letter!
But, anyway, the actual problem I was running into was what to do with a bunch of totally random songs, each by a different artist. Like I have a whole directory of oldies music, just the random popular stuff. Half the time I don't even know who the song is by.
I think I've solved the problem by naming them backwards, aka, Title-Artist.mp3, but we'll see.
First mandate that pension plans offered by any employer have an option that includes the ability to not possess stock. If you look at many workplaces you will find that these options simply don't exist.
Or just have the new stock put equally into the pension plan.
The problem there is idiotic pension plans that vary based on stock prices.
This is because, as the super rich have sucked more and profits out the system, slowing the growth of wages but not inflation, society has become more and more dependent on risky investments to actually plan for their future. Instead of keeping the money in CDs, or at the most risky, in bonds. People used to be able to save, in safe investments at 3%, for the future. Now they have to, if they want to retire comfortable, save at 7% in various dubious things.
Ask all the people retiring now who were planning on selling their house, their 'investment', and moving to smaller place and living off the profit. Oh, wait, those people aren't retiring now.
This is not my fault, and objecting to what I'm suggesting on the ground that people might have made stupidly risky investments in companies without knowing what they're doing is not really a good objection.
While I agree with you that this is definitely their own fault, I think that before we change the system in the way you've mentioned we should make sure more people are prepared.
You are a lot more cynical than me, apparently think some significant portion of companies would be taken down using this concept.
Companies do not generally commit felonies. Large companies almost never. Even here, if it was 'stalking', (Actually, it was some sort of harassment, and I doubt it would be any sort of felony.), it wasn't Toyota, it was some ad company they hired who had the criminally stupid idea to send vague unlabeled email.
Essentially, if some executive at the company didn't currently go to jail for it, or at least should have gone to jail, it wouldn't be what I'm talking about. (And even then, it would have to be a crime for the company, not against it. Stealing from a company obviously should not result in any sanctions against said company.)
You know, this is the sort of shit that should result in a class action suit.
The product used to do X, people bought it with the understanding it could do X. X was not covered by the warranty, but maybe those people didn't want the damn warranty.
And then X was deliberately broken for no purpose but for the company to make more money. Millions of people got, very slightly, harmed.
Microsoft should have to show up in court, where the average 'value' of using third-party hardware is debated, and if it's discovered to be $40 or whatever (And it easy could be, considering the markup in MS's stuff.), they should have to mail a check for that to every damn XBox owner.
Or, even better, change things back to how they were.
If they want everyone to have humungous hard drives, why the hell aren't they providing them at some sort of reasonable cost? (Or at all!)
It's shit like this that makes me unlikely to ever own a console. Yeah, I have to deal with all sorts of stupid hardware things in Windows.
Like why the hell is Fallout 3's radio music stuttering? No, I've already googled it and found the reason, I just can't seem to fix the stupid problem...apparently, Vista's mp3 decoder is crap or something, and I'm sure there's a really good reason that Bethesda decided to use whatever decoder the OS provided instead of using ogg or something. My best explanation: They are stupid.
But, despite that sort of crap, guess what? I can install a new hard drive whenever I want. At normal price. I can run XBMC without any sort of modchip. I can use whatever controllers I want, and they sell USB controllers that mimic all consoles so if I actually wanted one of those, I could get one. (And, in fact, I have a pseudo-PS2 one.)
I can run trainers need be, I can easily install user-created mods in games that support them (The reason I realized Fallout was behaving badly with the music is that I installed a mod that added 100 thematically correct songs to the GNR playlist.), I can install no-cd cracks and not worry about possibly damaging CDs. I can upgrade the damn game, which admittedly is needed more on PC than console, but better it exists and is used more often than it not exist and be needed just once!
Give me an open-but-possibly-sometimes-incompatible platform over a closed-software, closed-hardware one any day.
And, as a plus, it also means I have a damn computer, which I need anyway.
No, what I'm saying is that people don't somehow deserve some magical way to make money without risk or work, even for their 'retirement'.
You want to save risklessly for your retirement, put your money either into a FDIC insured bank, or buy government bonds, both of which will be good as long as the government continues to operate. (And if the government fails, money isn't going to be worth a lot anyway, so you'll only lose your money if it doesn't matter.)
But, of course, you'll get a relatively low rate of return.
You want something with more risk, and hence producing more profit and requiring more work, invest in the stock market. Or gold, or property, or comic books, or whatever.
Don't bitch at me that I'm suggesting adding slightly more risk to stock. I'm not suggesting we do it secretly, so, logically, such increased risk would lead to increased profits.
In fact, I have several schemes that would, incidentally, reduce the risk of stock ownership, like not allowing day trading or in fact any ownership short of a year. But those aren't really relevant here.
The thing that is relevant is the only group of people in charge of a company in any legal or practical sense is the stockholders, and hence the only thing that could possible discourage a company from illegal actions is, in fact, those actions posing a threat to the stockholders.
Lesser crimes result in fines, which would result in, say, a 5% drop in stock prices. Larger crimes would result in larger fines and thus larger drops.
Large enough crimes should logically result in people losing 100% of the stock prices as the company ends up with all assets forfeited. So what I'm proposing already happens, or it would if our courts had the balls to actually fine large corporations.
But doing it that way results in the company dying and being broken apart in bankrupcy court, which is not in the best interest of society, so instead we should just do what I said.
Yeah, I rip my music at 320kbps, despite the fact that I know you can't actually hear the difference and that 160kpbs or 192kbps is well past what I can distinguish?
Why? Well...why not? I have the disk space. I mean, I have the White Album ripped at 320, it takes up 160 megs, but I could have made it only take up 80 or even 60. But meanwhile, I have every episode of Arrested Development that takes up 13000 megs. For no obvious reason. There's an two order of magnitude difference, it's like worrying about if the weight of the quarter in your pocket is going to affect your gas mileage.
I bought a 160 gig NAS, I plugged a 320 USB drive into it, and I don't worry about this 'space' problem anymore. When I do, I'll buy another USB drive and hook it in. As it is, my music isn't even a fifth of the original drive!
At some point in the last three or four years, files appear to have stopped expanding to fit all available space. Seriously.
Likewise, I only have a 8 gig iPhone, and usually 2 gig of it is filled with random crap, so only 6 gigs...but 320kbps is only 40Kps, or 2.4M a minute, so that's 2500 minutes...which is 41 hour of music. My iPhone will not, in fact, play music for 41 hours over my bluetooth headset without the batteries dying. As will the batteries in my headset.
Ergo, I cannot possibly put enough music on my iPhone, at the highest bitrate, to actually listen to it all without plugging in to recharge. At which point I can swap out the music.
And this is, of course, music I own and encoded. I...ahem...appear to somehow have a lot of music I do not own and did not encode, which is usually 240kbps or 160kbps.
So, there's just some standard music that I keep on it, and then I add and remove albums, and I never even slightly have to think 'I wish I had more room, or that files were encoded at a smaller size.' (Except when I'm trying to copy them to my iPhone on the way out the door because I got some random notion to listen to someone as I was leaving.)
I guess if I was going on some two week vacation with my iPhone but without my laptop or something I might care.
Someone spent the evening with his spectrum detector trying to cheat, but didn't think of doing a bit comparison of the tracks, which would at least tell him which was the same as the first track? Lame.
But, yes, everyone who thinks they can hear the difference: Reencode the track to WAV and put it back on a CD, along with the original. See if you can tell the difference on the same device. Put the CD player on shuffle and see if you can guess which is playing, and then look at the track.
Likewise, mp3 players can play at 320kps bitrate, which really should be totally indistinguishable from unencoded. So put two files on there, one at 320 and one at 128, with different names, use shuffle, and see.
There are people out there who can tell at 128k...but don't kid yourself, you're probably not one of them.
Yeah, I just don't get why people don't use FLAC for their own CDs. Whenever I get a CD, I rip it immediately to FLAC, label it with the metadata and whatnot so I never have to do that again, put them in an artist/album directory, and then encode it however I want it, currently 320kbs mp3.
The FLACs then get burned to a DVD and deleted from my computer. (Obviously, one of those where you can write multiple sessions to.) Although, like you said, I'm at the point where I could, instead, keep the FLACs around and play them. But I don't think there's a meaningful difference between lossless and 320kps mp3, and I'd still need mp3s for my iPhone anyway. Yes, I know there's a lossless format for that, but it's only 8 gigs of space.
If I ever need to change formats, like I did from 128kps mp3 to 320 mp3, or like I did for my OGG experiment (Which I gave up on.), I just pull out the FLAC DVD and drag and drop the entire DVD to foobar 2000 or lamedropXPd or whatever, and tell it to convert the files and write them wherever they go. Hopefully they can keep their paths, but if not, or if you change the format of the filename(1), it's easy enough to automatically move them, because they already have metadata.
Every few hours I swap DVDs (Well, okay, I only have three, but in principle it would work for a very large library.)
Entire music library converted with almost no work at all. I can't imagine the people who have to track down every CD they own and run them back through the computer, and type or lookup the metadata again, one CD at a time.
Hell, I can't even imagine having to track down the original CDs if I wanted to burn a copy. I suppose more people just burn them off the mp3s or whatever, though.
1) Ah, the eternal question: Do you put artist and album in the filename, or just the path? The later makes more sense, but only if you have no non-album songs. I seem to flip back and forth every year or so, but luckily have programs that make mass renaming easy.
Right now I'm experimenting with having an Albums directory, where files are Artist/Album/1-Songname.mp3, and then have an entirely different structure for non-albums in a different directory.
Indeed, different codecs are, in fact, different. (Tautology time!)
What they need to do is figure out what information different codecs strip out of the music, and test that stripping at different levels.
Because with modern VBR stuff, you can't absolutely say 'X will be removed.' What you can say is that 'one of the things that encoding X does is smooth this waveform, let us call that transformation X1. X1 is statistically noticed by 10% at this level, and 40% at this level, etc.'.
This is, in fact, how the compressions were made in the first place, although in a more hypothetical sense of what the human ear and brain should be capable of hearing, and not 'People don't actually care about that sound'.
What the hell do either OSS4 or ALSA have to do with PulseAudio?
PulseAudio is a replacement for asound and esd. It's a sound daemon, not a sound driver system.
It can, at the moment, only use ALSA, but that's not some sort of fundamental requirement. In the long run, I expect PulseAudio will use whatever drivers get used the most, and hopefully at some point even support Windows. (Not for really needed for local use, but useful for networking stuff.)
It's like half the people here don't even know what they're talking about when they talk about PulseAudio.
Various people have pointed out the problem with free food.
However, there's plenty of other stuff we could be buying that would cause goodwill, like buying mosquito netting to stop malaria. We could wipe that entire disease out in a decade with a million dollars worth of netting total, and maybe ten one-hundred thousand dollar pesticide campaigns. Malaria is only contagious from human to mosquito and vis versa, so reducing the number of moquito bites, and killing large sections of the mosquito population so that the new mosquitos don't have it makes a huge impact on the disease. (And, unlike curing most diseases, we don't have the pharmaceutical industry whining about patents.)
That's just one suggestion I know of off the top of my head.
And, while the other posts point how much we send in foreign aid, it's worth pointing out we send that as money. And, yes, it's money for specific purposes, but it's usually purposes they'd do anyway, and thus all it does is move money around. (Money is fungible.)
Hell, a lot of the money is specifically not earmarked, and the country happily uses it to run their military, or to pay for fancy new roads in their big cities while ignoring the people living in villages who don't even have electricity.
What we need to do is show up and say 'Okay, about how many people need netting. Cause we've got, like, a few square miles of spare netting. Wherever you guys need it.'.
The cost of medical school sure is a reason why care in the US is so awfully expensive. A doctor in Spain gets through medical school for under $10K, total. That would bring us a whole lot more doctors, and far lower doctor salaries.
The demand for doctors being depressed so long, which should have lowered the cost for medical schooling, but really didn't, because schools are, in many ways, fixed costs. It essentially costs them as much to train 75 doctors as 100 doctors.
So now they're paying for 125% of their tuition.
It'd also even out the difference between specialists and primary care physicians. Out there in Europe and Japan world, most specialists really don't make a whole lot more than someone doing primary care.
That one is entirely health insurance's doing. Both in their payment schedules, and the fact that the uninsured don't ever see primary care physicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Delta did too, at least on my flight from Atlanta to Vegas.
I don't know why the hell anyone would put up with not having that, considering it clearly costs the airline about 15 cents a seat, and they would only ever remove it in an attempt to overcharge people for stuff.
Christ, some people here are total morons.
Neither the TSA nor the cops work for the airlines. It is not some private business attempting to deny someone access to them, it is the government attempting to deny a person access to a business.
Look, businesses can refuse service to people on almost any grounds. A bar could, for example, kick someone out because they are carrying a musical instrument. Entirely legal for them to do. They don't have to justify it in anyway, they can stand there and say 'People with trombones cannot drink here'. 'People holding musical instruments' is not a protected class under the law, and business can refuse service to all those people generally, or in any specific case they want.
But that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that the bar has no problem with trombonists, but the police are standing in the road barring someone with a big box trying to enter to a bar, because the town has passed a law against playing music in bars, and he might have a musical instrument in there. No warrant, no judicial order, he just looks like a musician so they keep him out unless he lets them search his stuff.
And idiots like you are standing up for some hypothetical right of a business to refuse service to him, which isn't even slightly the issue here. In fact, if anything, the rights of businesses to do business with anyone they choose is being infringed. (Just like in some places with segregation, where it often was mandated by law in specific cases, even if the business did not want to participate.)
The key here is that flying isn't a basic human right. Those airplanes are privately owned,
The airport, however, is public property. Including the terminals beyond the security area.
I have a perfect right to be in that area, without any of their 'security' crap. I even have a ticket, if for some reason they're requiring me to have completed a private transaction with some third party before letting me onto that public property.
The government don't have a right to search me before walking around what is essentially a publicly owned mall. If any of the businesses in said mall want me to submit to a search before entering them, be it a Borders bookstore or a Delta airplane, that is entirely the businesses' right.
But it is not the right of the government to mandate that I be searched, without a warrant, and then do it themselves. (And then have have people somehow claiming this has anything to do with the rights of private businesses.)
Um, actually, no victim of a carbombing who's actually in the car when it explodes has any reasonable chance of surviving, so I have no idea what distinction you're trying to make here. For someone to survive, the bomb either has to go off prematurely, or not at all, either of which could conceivable happen with airplane bombs.(For example, the shoe bomber's bomb didn't go off.)
Nor do I think that distinction would make any difference even if it was true. 'Oh, hey, if your car explodes you randomly have a 10% chance of surviving, so that's not a security concern.'
And how would that be hard to get that much on a plane? It would just take a dozen people buying tickets.
Not actually getting on the plane, mind you. Just buying tickets on some flight, not even the one they're going to blow up, to get through security.
Or they could even print fake tickets to get through security. You can't get on a plane with a fake ticket, but you can get through security just fine, as they don't actually check that your home-printed ticket is actually legit. As has been repeatedly pointed out. (You could even use people flying in to transport the stuff.)
And then they all sit down next to each other at some terminal at the back of the airport, and pass their little baggies to each other. You can think of less noticeable and more convoluted schemes to pass stuff to each other, but, frankly, most waiting areas at airports have seats that face 'backwards' away from any possible onlookers, so really just having them sit next to each other would work. (And you pass clothing backwards.)
Anyone who thinks this is suspicious has never observed their own behavior at an airport. The very first thing anyone does after sitting down at their terminal is to rearrange their bags (Which were organized weird for security, and now need to be organized for the plane.), often trading items with people who are in their group.
The last collector then purchases some bottled water, goes to the bathroom, pours it out, and sits on the toilet for ten minutes putting it all together. (If it's a binary explosive, have one guy collect one side, and another guy collect the other, and put it together, and then one person does one more handoff.)
Meanwhile, all but that person walk happily out of the airport, or, heck, get on their flight.
Anyone who can't figure out how to get 2 two liters amounts of any liquid, together, behind airport security, is a moron. It's trivially easy. (Although it'd end up being in a plastic bag or something, not a two liter bottle, as those are hard to find at airports, and suspicious for security. 'Luckily', we're supposed to take liter plastic bags through security, and having more than one isn't suspicious.)
Yes, whitehouse.gov is a very attacked site, for all sorts of reasons, and I bet it will be the very first place to try out any new Drupal vulnerability, and at least one of those will succeed sometime in the next couple of years.
But, um...who cares if it does? It's not a mission critical web site. It's stupid fluff pieces about the president and his initiatives. If something goes wrong it gets flipped offline, restored from backup, patched, and brought back online.
It's interesting to see the government try OSS, and that might be an interesting discussion, but way too many people(1) here instantly leapt to the non-existence security implications, acting like important government computers were going to be exposed via any security issues in Drupal.
1) And half the remaining people appear to be morons talking about how CMS are useless. They haven't realized that stating 'people don't need CMSes' doesn't, like they think, show that they're some elite HTML coder, it just reveals them as someone who's never been hired to make a web site for someone else who then can add and remove content.
Why do you assume they're not doing that?
Because he's a moron who doesn't understand how CMSes are actually used in the real world, and thinks the only point of them is for 'dynamic' content.
When in actual fact something like half of all CMS sites are mostly 'static', with maybe a forum and an RSS feed block being their sole 'automatically changing' area, and then rest is so that people who don't know a hell of a lot about web sites can fricking manage the site, or at least their area of it, and add and remove content.
Unless, unlike Windows, they haven't been trained into constantly downloading and installing things.
That, right there, that mindset, is the only way to keep computers safe...having people know that the way to install things is to launch the 'application manager' and have a nice interface come up with all the applications they can install.
This should not prompt for a password in any way, either. If on a computer set up as a single user the user wants to install or remove openoffice from it, they should be able to to just do so.
Likewise, a URL scheme to 'add a repository' should be created, so users can click on links in web pages launch the application manager, and check to make sure the repository is one of the known-good third party ones (Which should be easy to register for, but would still create a rather large barrier for malware.) and add it and open it.
And all this should be totally unable to access any system software at all, which would need a root password to install or uninstall, and which users should never need to use.
Get people doing this, have people know that this is how you install programs, you don't download things and then double click on them and enter a password, and you've removed most of the idiocy of manual virus infections. Don't even let them do that. Luckily, programs download with incorrect permissions, but don't let them do it to .deb or .rpm either...the thing they should download is a URL of a repository, which gets checked before being used with a master list of known good ones, and which they cannot click 'okay', or even enter a root password, to use if it's not on the list. (Instead, they have to go do a bunch of manual steps, so that software distributors don't have them do that.)
Likewise, almost all system settings, like configuring the network, should not require root privs, unless someone's specially set it that way. Make it where people think having to enter a root password is a weird thing they have to do when changing their antivirus or upgrading to the next version of their OS, not something they need to do when installing Flash.
How could the freezing point of water at exactly 0C require that the temperature is 15C? That makes no sense.
I think we're spending way too much time trying to 'cool' things that do not, in fact, need to be cooler than outside. Nowhere on earth is so hot that servers won't run, unless you've built a server room over an active volcano or something.
All we actually need to do is remove the heat from the servers to the air, and then keep swapping the air with the outside.
Which happens automatically if you let heat out the top and air in the bottom. Even if you have to condition the incoming air to remove moisture, that's cheaper than actually 'cooling' AC. So the second part, replacing the room air, is easy.
As for the first, I've always wondered why they don't use chimney-like devices to generate wind naturally and send it though server racks, instead of fans. I think all the heat in a server room could actually, on exit, suck incoming air in fast enough to cool computers if it actually hit the right places on the way in.
Heck, this would apply anyway. Instead of having AC vent into server rooms, why not have AC vent into server racks? Hook up the damn AC to the fan vent on each server, blow cold air straight in. The room itself could end not cold at all.
They couldn't play normal WoW, because of the lag.
I am assuming that this 'trip' will correctly simulate speed-of-light delay, right? And bandwidth issues?
From what I can tell, they're not simulating the technical aspects of the trip, just 'locked up for 17 months', just the social ones, but hopefully they're doing that. (And even stuff like 'Okay, today we made it to Mars, so you're going to have to run around like madmen for a few hours pushing whatever button we light up to simulate the stress and work of landing')
They could, however, have computer lan with servers specifically set up for gaming. And both multiplayer and single player games. Oh, and give them a mirror of wikipedia.
From what I understand, sending from spacecraft is a power issue, and attempting to build low power transmitters is why we always have problems in that regard. But sending to them isn't an issue at all, especially if we're willing to only contact them 15% of the time, we can put a big honking transmitter on ISS or something. So we could even send them new games and stuff.
I understand why some people care about the year, but to me it's never seemed important.
Likewise, I don't have anywhere near enough artists have to divide them by first letter!
But, anyway, the actual problem I was running into was what to do with a bunch of totally random songs, each by a different artist. Like I have a whole directory of oldies music, just the random popular stuff. Half the time I don't even know who the song is by.
I think I've solved the problem by naming them backwards, aka, Title-Artist.mp3, but we'll see.
First mandate that pension plans offered by any employer have an option that includes the ability to not possess stock. If you look at many workplaces you will find that these options simply don't exist.
Or just have the new stock put equally into the pension plan.
The problem there is idiotic pension plans that vary based on stock prices.
This is because, as the super rich have sucked more and profits out the system, slowing the growth of wages but not inflation, society has become more and more dependent on risky investments to actually plan for their future. Instead of keeping the money in CDs, or at the most risky, in bonds. People used to be able to save, in safe investments at 3%, for the future. Now they have to, if they want to retire comfortable, save at 7% in various dubious things.
Ask all the people retiring now who were planning on selling their house, their 'investment', and moving to smaller place and living off the profit. Oh, wait, those people aren't retiring now.
This is not my fault, and objecting to what I'm suggesting on the ground that people might have made stupidly risky investments in companies without knowing what they're doing is not really a good objection.
While I agree with you that this is definitely their own fault, I think that before we change the system in the way you've mentioned we should make sure more people are prepared.
You are a lot more cynical than me, apparently think some significant portion of companies would be taken down using this concept.
Companies do not generally commit felonies. Large companies almost never. Even here, if it was 'stalking', (Actually, it was some sort of harassment, and I doubt it would be any sort of felony.), it wasn't Toyota, it was some ad company they hired who had the criminally stupid idea to send vague unlabeled email.
Essentially, if some executive at the company didn't currently go to jail for it, or at least should have gone to jail, it wouldn't be what I'm talking about. (And even then, it would have to be a crime for the company, not against it. Stealing from a company obviously should not result in any sanctions against said company.)
You know, this is the sort of shit that should result in a class action suit.
The product used to do X, people bought it with the understanding it could do X. X was not covered by the warranty, but maybe those people didn't want the damn warranty.
And then X was deliberately broken for no purpose but for the company to make more money. Millions of people got, very slightly, harmed.
Microsoft should have to show up in court, where the average 'value' of using third-party hardware is debated, and if it's discovered to be $40 or whatever (And it easy could be, considering the markup in MS's stuff.), they should have to mail a check for that to every damn XBox owner.
Or, even better, change things back to how they were.
If they want everyone to have humungous hard drives, why the hell aren't they providing them at some sort of reasonable cost? (Or at all!)
It's shit like this that makes me unlikely to ever own a console. Yeah, I have to deal with all sorts of stupid hardware things in Windows.
Like why the hell is Fallout 3's radio music stuttering? No, I've already googled it and found the reason, I just can't seem to fix the stupid problem...apparently, Vista's mp3 decoder is crap or something, and I'm sure there's a really good reason that Bethesda decided to use whatever decoder the OS provided instead of using ogg or something. My best explanation: They are stupid.
But, despite that sort of crap, guess what? I can install a new hard drive whenever I want. At normal price. I can run XBMC without any sort of modchip. I can use whatever controllers I want, and they sell USB controllers that mimic all consoles so if I actually wanted one of those, I could get one. (And, in fact, I have a pseudo-PS2 one.)
I can run trainers need be, I can easily install user-created mods in games that support them (The reason I realized Fallout was behaving badly with the music is that I installed a mod that added 100 thematically correct songs to the GNR playlist.), I can install no-cd cracks and not worry about possibly damaging CDs. I can upgrade the damn game, which admittedly is needed more on PC than console, but better it exists and is used more often than it not exist and be needed just once!
Give me an open-but-possibly-sometimes-incompatible platform over a closed-software, closed-hardware one any day.
And, as a plus, it also means I have a damn computer, which I need anyway.
No, what I'm saying is that people don't somehow deserve some magical way to make money without risk or work, even for their 'retirement'.
You want to save risklessly for your retirement, put your money either into a FDIC insured bank, or buy government bonds, both of which will be good as long as the government continues to operate. (And if the government fails, money isn't going to be worth a lot anyway, so you'll only lose your money if it doesn't matter.)
But, of course, you'll get a relatively low rate of return.
You want something with more risk, and hence producing more profit and requiring more work, invest in the stock market. Or gold, or property, or comic books, or whatever.
Don't bitch at me that I'm suggesting adding slightly more risk to stock. I'm not suggesting we do it secretly, so, logically, such increased risk would lead to increased profits.
In fact, I have several schemes that would, incidentally, reduce the risk of stock ownership, like not allowing day trading or in fact any ownership short of a year. But those aren't really relevant here.
The thing that is relevant is the only group of people in charge of a company in any legal or practical sense is the stockholders, and hence the only thing that could possible discourage a company from illegal actions is, in fact, those actions posing a threat to the stockholders.
Lesser crimes result in fines, which would result in, say, a 5% drop in stock prices. Larger crimes would result in larger fines and thus larger drops.
Large enough crimes should logically result in people losing 100% of the stock prices as the company ends up with all assets forfeited. So what I'm proposing already happens, or it would if our courts had the balls to actually fine large corporations.
But doing it that way results in the company dying and being broken apart in bankrupcy court, which is not in the best interest of society, so instead we should just do what I said.
Yeah, I rip my music at 320kbps, despite the fact that I know you can't actually hear the difference and that 160kpbs or 192kbps is well past what I can distinguish?
Why? Well...why not? I have the disk space. I mean, I have the White Album ripped at 320, it takes up 160 megs, but I could have made it only take up 80 or even 60. But meanwhile, I have every episode of Arrested Development that takes up 13000 megs. For no obvious reason. There's an two order of magnitude difference, it's like worrying about if the weight of the quarter in your pocket is going to affect your gas mileage.
I bought a 160 gig NAS, I plugged a 320 USB drive into it, and I don't worry about this 'space' problem anymore. When I do, I'll buy another USB drive and hook it in. As it is, my music isn't even a fifth of the original drive!
At some point in the last three or four years, files appear to have stopped expanding to fit all available space. Seriously.
Likewise, I only have a 8 gig iPhone, and usually 2 gig of it is filled with random crap, so only 6 gigs...but 320kbps is only 40Kps, or 2.4M a minute, so that's 2500 minutes...which is 41 hour of music. My iPhone will not, in fact, play music for 41 hours over my bluetooth headset without the batteries dying. As will the batteries in my headset.
Ergo, I cannot possibly put enough music on my iPhone, at the highest bitrate, to actually listen to it all without plugging in to recharge. At which point I can swap out the music.
And this is, of course, music I own and encoded. I...ahem...appear to somehow have a lot of music I do not own and did not encode, which is usually 240kbps or 160kbps.
So, there's just some standard music that I keep on it, and then I add and remove albums, and I never even slightly have to think 'I wish I had more room, or that files were encoded at a smaller size.' (Except when I'm trying to copy them to my iPhone on the way out the door because I got some random notion to listen to someone as I was leaving.)
I guess if I was going on some two week vacation with my iPhone but without my laptop or something I might care.
Or Slim Whitman's music and one person's head exploded.
Someone spent the evening with his spectrum detector trying to cheat, but didn't think of doing a bit comparison of the tracks, which would at least tell him which was the same as the first track? Lame.
But, yes, everyone who thinks they can hear the difference: Reencode the track to WAV and put it back on a CD, along with the original. See if you can tell the difference on the same device. Put the CD player on shuffle and see if you can guess which is playing, and then look at the track.
Likewise, mp3 players can play at 320kps bitrate, which really should be totally indistinguishable from unencoded. So put two files on there, one at 320 and one at 128, with different names, use shuffle, and see.
There are people out there who can tell at 128k...but don't kid yourself, you're probably not one of them.
I'll bet you that real stereophiles can tell the difference, but they're a dying breed.
Half the 'stereophiles' out there are running around buying Monster digital audio and HDMI cables.
Yeah, I just don't get why people don't use FLAC for their own CDs. Whenever I get a CD, I rip it immediately to FLAC, label it with the metadata and whatnot so I never have to do that again, put them in an artist/album directory, and then encode it however I want it, currently 320kbs mp3.
The FLACs then get burned to a DVD and deleted from my computer. (Obviously, one of those where you can write multiple sessions to.) Although, like you said, I'm at the point where I could, instead, keep the FLACs around and play them. But I don't think there's a meaningful difference between lossless and 320kps mp3, and I'd still need mp3s for my iPhone anyway. Yes, I know there's a lossless format for that, but it's only 8 gigs of space.
If I ever need to change formats, like I did from 128kps mp3 to 320 mp3, or like I did for my OGG experiment (Which I gave up on.), I just pull out the FLAC DVD and drag and drop the entire DVD to foobar 2000 or lamedropXPd or whatever, and tell it to convert the files and write them wherever they go. Hopefully they can keep their paths, but if not, or if you change the format of the filename(1), it's easy enough to automatically move them, because they already have metadata.
Every few hours I swap DVDs (Well, okay, I only have three, but in principle it would work for a very large library.)
Entire music library converted with almost no work at all. I can't imagine the people who have to track down every CD they own and run them back through the computer, and type or lookup the metadata again, one CD at a time.
Hell, I can't even imagine having to track down the original CDs if I wanted to burn a copy. I suppose more people just burn them off the mp3s or whatever, though.
1) Ah, the eternal question: Do you put artist and album in the filename, or just the path? The later makes more sense, but only if you have no non-album songs. I seem to flip back and forth every year or so, but luckily have programs that make mass renaming easy.
Right now I'm experimenting with having an Albums directory, where files are Artist/Album/1-Songname.mp3, and then have an entirely different structure for non-albums in a different directory.
Indeed, different codecs are, in fact, different. (Tautology time!)
What they need to do is figure out what information different codecs strip out of the music, and test that stripping at different levels.
Because with modern VBR stuff, you can't absolutely say 'X will be removed.' What you can say is that 'one of the things that encoding X does is smooth this waveform, let us call that transformation X1. X1 is statistically noticed by 10% at this level, and 40% at this level, etc.'.
This is, in fact, how the compressions were made in the first place, although in a more hypothetical sense of what the human ear and brain should be capable of hearing, and not 'People don't actually care about that sound'.
What the hell do either OSS4 or ALSA have to do with PulseAudio?
PulseAudio is a replacement for asound and esd. It's a sound daemon, not a sound driver system.
It can, at the moment, only use ALSA, but that's not some sort of fundamental requirement. In the long run, I expect PulseAudio will use whatever drivers get used the most, and hopefully at some point even support Windows. (Not for really needed for local use, but useful for networking stuff.)
It's like half the people here don't even know what they're talking about when they talk about PulseAudio.
Various people have pointed out the problem with free food.
However, there's plenty of other stuff we could be buying that would cause goodwill, like buying mosquito netting to stop malaria. We could wipe that entire disease out in a decade with a million dollars worth of netting total, and maybe ten one-hundred thousand dollar pesticide campaigns. Malaria is only contagious from human to mosquito and vis versa, so reducing the number of moquito bites, and killing large sections of the mosquito population so that the new mosquitos don't have it makes a huge impact on the disease. (And, unlike curing most diseases, we don't have the pharmaceutical industry whining about patents.)
That's just one suggestion I know of off the top of my head.
And, while the other posts point how much we send in foreign aid, it's worth pointing out we send that as money. And, yes, it's money for specific purposes, but it's usually purposes they'd do anyway, and thus all it does is move money around. (Money is fungible.)
Hell, a lot of the money is specifically not earmarked, and the country happily uses it to run their military, or to pay for fancy new roads in their big cities while ignoring the people living in villages who don't even have electricity.
What we need to do is show up and say 'Okay, about how many people need netting. Cause we've got, like, a few square miles of spare netting. Wherever you guys need it.'.
The cost of medical school sure is a reason why care in the US is so awfully expensive. A doctor in Spain gets through medical school for under $10K, total. That would bring us a whole lot more doctors, and far lower doctor salaries.
The demand for doctors being depressed so long, which should have lowered the cost for medical schooling, but really didn't, because schools are, in many ways, fixed costs. It essentially costs them as much to train 75 doctors as 100 doctors.
So now they're paying for 125% of their tuition.
It'd also even out the difference between specialists and primary care physicians. Out there in Europe and Japan world, most specialists really don't make a whole lot more than someone doing primary care.
That one is entirely health insurance's doing. Both in their payment schedules, and the fact that the uninsured don't ever see primary care physicians.