Calm down, the guy just wants a GPS tracker in case his kid gets misplaced *again*. Although, about 1 in 10,000 of persons under 18 go permanently missing every year in the US. In the context of a family matter, having better last known coordinates of a child would probably be a good thing for parents.
For many buildings, the problem with a corrugated steel roof is noise. In the rain a metal roof is substantially more noisy than a tar shingled roof, so much so that it can be difficult to carry on a conversation with others. I've wondered if coating the backside with rubber would help at all.
Okay, I figured out why the Wolfram data looks bunk. It apparently lacks historical data for the EU as a whole, so it is taking current EU data and comparing it to historical US data. Obviously this isn't very useful other than to demonstrate how the US GDP has been doing compared to itself. You can compare individual countries though for at least the past 10 years or so and see the numbers go up and down in a more expected manner.
Except that we need to compare with Europe as a whole, not just the states within the community.
According to Wolfram (this seems the sort of question it works well with), GDP for USA is $13.78T and Europe is $17.95T
That is a terrible metric because Europe has almost twice the population of the US. You might as well compare the GDP of the US to Asia. It would be far more useful to compare the GDP per population of the two and fortunately Wolfram will also graph that.
Now the graph gets much more interesting. You can see that the production per citizen in the US has been steadily improving since at least 1970 relative to Europe. According to the graph, in 1970 Europeans produced about six times as much as US citizens, but now produce about 67% as much. Changing the graph to the European Union specifically has relatively little change.
I'm a little doubtful those numbers are correct though. The 1970 numbers just seem insane, and the steady improvement in our economy doesn't seem to match what everyone is saying. It's possible the source data is bad, or the numbers don't accurately reflect population due to how corporations shift money around.
Escalating to root is a particularly troublesome issue in Windows environments where users often run with elevated privileges. Even if a user has only elevated privileges (Power-user and above) on a single machine in the organization, a program can set itself to run for any user that logs on. Then the first user to log on that administrative privileges across an organization will run the program and potentially infect all other systems the user is an administrator on. And that's all without any exploits. (The best reason to never use a server administrator to log on to a workstation.)
When we had the opportunity to rebuild our network from the ground up, my boss insisted that the usernames be different from the email addresses for security reasons. No amount of talking to him would convince him this was entirely unnecessary as account lockouts would protect from password guessing bots. It's not an issue most of the time, but it is added confusion for users, and when it is an issue it is a real pain.
Usually when this happens to mean it means it's time to clean the dust off of the video card's heat sink. A bit of dust clogging things up lets the card overheat, causing artifacts.
I'm running a Geforce 250 GTS with a 400W power supply. I'd originally bought a more powerful supply, but didn't have any problems with the old one so returned it. Honestly, I'm surprised it works.
Sure you have to install an OS, but it's a pretty simple installer. Once you've set with network card is which, and an IP address, it's all web based configurations. I'd just use whatever wireless gear you happen to have, or buy something for cheap. Gigabit switches are overkill, unless you transfer large files over your local network. I bought a consumer 5 port gigabit switch from Fry's for $20, so it's not exactly the end of the world.
The most important thing is not to use a DSL modem that does NAT. You want a transparent bridge that can pass all of the packets quickly without having to do any processing power. You want the NAT translation and connection states moved to the PC/router that can easily handle it without locking up.
First, get a DSL modem that isn't a NAT gateway. As a general rule, embedded consumer hardware isn't very good and will lock up randomly under load. Find a DSL modem that acts as a transparent network bridge so that all it has to do is pass unmodified packets back and forth. Sorting through all those connection states with its limited CPU is going to kill it.
Next, find a small/old PC for cheap and install one of the many router distribution on it. I use pfSense because it comes with QoS so that I can drop P2P to the lowest priority so that it has little effect on the rest of the network. I've been using this for a year and I've never had it lock up or slow down under load. It also comes with little bandwidth charts that showed we typically transfer around 500GB/month.
I personally use a Dell Optiplex GX50 small form factor that a friend had sitting unused on a shelf for years. It idles at about 35W and goes up to about 50W while passing 16Mbps of prioritized traffic. It could easily handle twice that, and I could use a compact flash card instead of a harddrive to reduce the power more. Looking on ebay, I see one going for $1 right now.
Oh, and for wireless just use whatever. You could drop a wireless NIC into the router, or use an access point. I use my $150 wireless N gaming router that locked up all the time with DHCP turned off (I originally bought it to replace another high end router that was always locking up). It works fine if it just needs to act as a switch.
Notice that I didn't say nothing should be done. I said that the severity of the action should be highly dependent on the situation (or possibly I implied?). Not every infraction should require firing someone, a public apology, and a lawsuit. I usually view lawsuits in these situations as serving one of three purposes:
1. Offering the encouragement needed for when an organization is not implementing needed changes.
2. Punishing an organization for gross negligence of not implementing a needed change that resulted in something negative (as encouragement to be more proactive in the future).
3. To recover damages from a failure in the system.
In my hypothetical from the previous post, I give actions that I think might be appropriate on the part of the organization (although, I would honestly probably want an apology myself). If it became apparent that absolutely nothing had happened, then a lawsuit would be appropriate to incite action.
(Again, this all my opinion, and how I'd like to do things when I someday rule the world with an iron fist as a benevolent dictator.)
Just to expand a little of my opinion on the topic, if someone is cordial and a police officer oversteps their bounds with them then something needs to be done.
If a person is purposefully an ass to an officer in a method that would reasonably be considered provoking, it is difficult to fault an officer for overstepping their bounds. This is why there are minimum and maximum punishments determined at the discretion of judges or management. In this case, I would think the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist may be appropriate.
In the case of the "don't taze me bro" event, depending on which video, and how much of it you watched, a very different story was told. The appropriateness of using a taser to stun the student varied quite a bit on what you saw and heard.
In the same manner, the article does offer a lot of insight into what happened or how the people acted. For all we know, the writer could have been cussing up a storm and getting in the officers face, acting erratically, and making other civilians nervous. Or, the roles could have been exactly opposite with the writer saying things in the friendliest possible manner, and the officer getting in his face and acting erratically. We will probably never know for sure.
If I had to guess, the was probably a jerk and the officer probably overreacted. When they got to the station and they said what had happened, the officer's superiors probably contacted REI and Loomis to see if they were filing charges for anything. REI and Loomis lawyers probably said there wasn't anything they could file charges for, and REI probably said the guy was banned from the store. At this point, the superiors probably told the officer to let the writer go, and sent then sat the officer down to tell them that it's not illegal to take pictures in the store, and possibly an admonition to be more level headed in the future. Then a little note was probably added to their file mentioning the incident.
Would this have been enough? In my opinion, probably. But, I don't like to pass judgment because I have seen way too many situations where someone thinks they know what happened, but are missing the one tiny piece of evidence that makes them completely wrong.
I'm not really sure how it's supposed to be my fault. I've never been in a situation where I would need to challenge some wrong being committed against me. I also support people that do have to challenge the system, and legislation that has a chance of fixing it. The point of my comment was that it is incorrect to assume that "the right way" is the way things are currently done.
Calling me spineless is uncalled for.
(Incidentally, Texas is not an open carry state. I've taken the concealed handgun course, but I'm not going to start wearing an exposed gun to protest. I'm also not going to wear one to work where it is illegal in a court of law to protest. There is a proper time, place, and way to oppose laws.)
I would refer you to the Wikipedia article on the Stanford Prison Experiment:
The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Those selected were chosen for their lack of psychological issues, crime history, and medical disabilities, in order to obtain a representative sample. Roles were assigned based on a coin toss.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After being confronted by Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating,[2] and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become too grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.
Six days is all it took for a significant number of well educated and stable people to "exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies" when placed in a position of power over others. Most of the officers I've met are genuinely good guys, and some of them have always wanted to help other and uphold the peace. But a lot of them just ended up as police officers for whatever reason. They are highly trained to place themselves in stressful and dangerous situations and take charge. That some of them get big heads and/or become corrupt isn't exactly surprising.
Police officers do need our support and understanding. But it's also important to call out inappropriate behavior before it devolves into something dangerous.
All of that is really how it "should be", not so much how it is. For instance, a "disturbing the peace" charge can be used for all sorts of things. Step out of line once, and they may charge you just because. Sure you might be able to get it dismissed, but it's a huge hassle, and quite possibly costly, while the officer can just shrug his shoulders and be on his way.
Sadly, you are unlikely to win a lawsuit for asking your neighbors questions, or for just about anything else. All the officer needs to say is "he was involved in suspicious activity, and I was following leads." And while it is possible to garner national attention, usually all you get is a 5 minute spotlight in the local news that everyone has forgotten by the next day.
Just to be clear, police officers also need a clear cause to draw their weapon on you.
Also, any police department worth their salt will have forms the police officer must fill out describing why they drew their weapon, as well as interviews from superiors. Some departments require a small amount of leave if the weapon is actually discharged. Making sure your officers know when to draw their weapons is a good thing.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of crappy and corrupt police departments out there.
I do IT for a small city, which includes a police department. I get the opportunity to chat with the police folk about any number of things they've encountered, and there are two very important things to remember.
1. There are any number of mundane and ambiguously worded laws that they can use to arrest you resulting in fines or jail time.
2. There is a lot that an officer can do that is rather harassing, but perfectly within their legal rights to do. For instance, the ATM photo guy, they could go around and ask all of his neighbors about him, and if he's been known to have been involved in any thefts or illegal activities. It can be inconvenient for all of your neighbors to suddenly suspect the worst of you.
There is no legal requirement to be nice to police officers (or anyone else around you), but you may find your life a lot better if you do.
When my brother bought his house, some time afterwards he had a list of things to fix. Most of it was pretty simple stuff, like a squeaky step, but he ended up having about 20 people come over that each specialized in a very specific type of fix. He was very satisfied with the builder's production quality as well as fixing things so not all builders are bad.
Our new building at work is a disaster of building. It's too late to be able to fix most of the issues without gutting the building, and the organization ended up just signing for the building because it would be more cost effective to have others come in to fix it. Pretty terrible really.
Yeah, limiting the scope to a time period would certainly be more useful.
I had one friend growing up that's in prison, and I know he played paintball once. So far in my tests 100% of prisoners play paintball. I guess I should work on increasing my sample size now.
From various exposes and such that I've seen on TV, it seems to be a quick cash method for the lazy that end up a large percentage of their profits just using drugs. Much like people involved in petty theft, or stealing copper cables to be sold. Sure you could make more money by just going and getting a job at McDonalds, but they lack the self discipline to actually show up to a job.
(I don't know if things are really being portrayed properly or not, but that is how it is shown.)
I'm sorry, feel the sting of being shot? Paintballs leave welts. Gunshots leave holes. That doesn't just "sting".
So? He's talking specifically about close rang combat. The motivation for not getting shot in a video game is pretty low because you can just start again the next round. The same thing happens in laser tag. In paintball you're a bit more cautious because getting shot at close range with a 300fps ball of paint hurts, even through a few layers of clothing.
Maybe if they made the controller to first person shooters deliver an electric shock when being shot people would be more cautious and would have a similar effect?
Slashdot Mirror
Calm down, the guy just wants a GPS tracker in case his kid gets misplaced *again*. Although, about 1 in 10,000 of persons under 18 go permanently missing every year in the US. In the context of a family matter, having better last known coordinates of a child would probably be a good thing for parents.
For many buildings, the problem with a corrugated steel roof is noise. In the rain a metal roof is substantially more noisy than a tar shingled roof, so much so that it can be difficult to carry on a conversation with others. I've wondered if coating the backside with rubber would help at all.
Okay, I figured out why the Wolfram data looks bunk. It apparently lacks historical data for the EU as a whole, so it is taking current EU data and comparing it to historical US data. Obviously this isn't very useful other than to demonstrate how the US GDP has been doing compared to itself. You can compare individual countries though for at least the past 10 years or so and see the numbers go up and down in a more expected manner.
Except that we need to compare with Europe as a whole, not just the states within the community.
According to Wolfram (this seems the sort of question it works well with), GDP for USA is $13.78T and Europe is $17.95T
That is a terrible metric because Europe has almost twice the population of the US. You might as well compare the GDP of the US to Asia. It would be far more useful to compare the GDP per population of the two and fortunately Wolfram will also graph that.
Now the graph gets much more interesting. You can see that the production per citizen in the US has been steadily improving since at least 1970 relative to Europe. According to the graph, in 1970 Europeans produced about six times as much as US citizens, but now produce about 67% as much. Changing the graph to the European Union specifically has relatively little change.
I'm a little doubtful those numbers are correct though. The 1970 numbers just seem insane, and the steady improvement in our economy doesn't seem to match what everyone is saying. It's possible the source data is bad, or the numbers don't accurately reflect population due to how corporations shift money around.
Escalating to root is a particularly troublesome issue in Windows environments where users often run with elevated privileges. Even if a user has only elevated privileges (Power-user and above) on a single machine in the organization, a program can set itself to run for any user that logs on. Then the first user to log on that administrative privileges across an organization will run the program and potentially infect all other systems the user is an administrator on. And that's all without any exploits. (The best reason to never use a server administrator to log on to a workstation.)
When we had the opportunity to rebuild our network from the ground up, my boss insisted that the usernames be different from the email addresses for security reasons. No amount of talking to him would convince him this was entirely unnecessary as account lockouts would protect from password guessing bots. It's not an issue most of the time, but it is added confusion for users, and when it is an issue it is a real pain.
Usually when this happens to mean it means it's time to clean the dust off of the video card's heat sink. A bit of dust clogging things up lets the card overheat, causing artifacts.
I'm running a Geforce 250 GTS with a 400W power supply. I'd originally bought a more powerful supply, but didn't have any problems with the old one so returned it. Honestly, I'm surprised it works.
See my reply here:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1238997&cid=28028381
Sure you have to install an OS, but it's a pretty simple installer. Once you've set with network card is which, and an IP address, it's all web based configurations. I'd just use whatever wireless gear you happen to have, or buy something for cheap. Gigabit switches are overkill, unless you transfer large files over your local network. I bought a consumer 5 port gigabit switch from Fry's for $20, so it's not exactly the end of the world.
The most important thing is not to use a DSL modem that does NAT. You want a transparent bridge that can pass all of the packets quickly without having to do any processing power. You want the NAT translation and connection states moved to the PC/router that can easily handle it without locking up.
First, get a DSL modem that isn't a NAT gateway. As a general rule, embedded consumer hardware isn't very good and will lock up randomly under load. Find a DSL modem that acts as a transparent network bridge so that all it has to do is pass unmodified packets back and forth. Sorting through all those connection states with its limited CPU is going to kill it.
Next, find a small/old PC for cheap and install one of the many router distribution on it. I use pfSense because it comes with QoS so that I can drop P2P to the lowest priority so that it has little effect on the rest of the network. I've been using this for a year and I've never had it lock up or slow down under load. It also comes with little bandwidth charts that showed we typically transfer around 500GB/month.
I personally use a Dell Optiplex GX50 small form factor that a friend had sitting unused on a shelf for years. It idles at about 35W and goes up to about 50W while passing 16Mbps of prioritized traffic. It could easily handle twice that, and I could use a compact flash card instead of a harddrive to reduce the power more. Looking on ebay, I see one going for $1 right now.
Oh, and for wireless just use whatever. You could drop a wireless NIC into the router, or use an access point. I use my $150 wireless N gaming router that locked up all the time with DHCP turned off (I originally bought it to replace another high end router that was always locking up). It works fine if it just needs to act as a switch.
Notice that I didn't say nothing should be done. I said that the severity of the action should be highly dependent on the situation (or possibly I implied?). Not every infraction should require firing someone, a public apology, and a lawsuit. I usually view lawsuits in these situations as serving one of three purposes:
1. Offering the encouragement needed for when an organization is not implementing needed changes.
2. Punishing an organization for gross negligence of not implementing a needed change that resulted in something negative (as encouragement to be more proactive in the future).
3. To recover damages from a failure in the system.
In my hypothetical from the previous post, I give actions that I think might be appropriate on the part of the organization (although, I would honestly probably want an apology myself). If it became apparent that absolutely nothing had happened, then a lawsuit would be appropriate to incite action.
(Again, this all my opinion, and how I'd like to do things when I someday rule the world with an iron fist as a benevolent dictator.)
Just to expand a little of my opinion on the topic, if someone is cordial and a police officer oversteps their bounds with them then something needs to be done.
If a person is purposefully an ass to an officer in a method that would reasonably be considered provoking, it is difficult to fault an officer for overstepping their bounds. This is why there are minimum and maximum punishments determined at the discretion of judges or management. In this case, I would think the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist may be appropriate.
In the case of the "don't taze me bro" event, depending on which video, and how much of it you watched, a very different story was told. The appropriateness of using a taser to stun the student varied quite a bit on what you saw and heard.
In the same manner, the article does offer a lot of insight into what happened or how the people acted. For all we know, the writer could have been cussing up a storm and getting in the officers face, acting erratically, and making other civilians nervous. Or, the roles could have been exactly opposite with the writer saying things in the friendliest possible manner, and the officer getting in his face and acting erratically. We will probably never know for sure.
If I had to guess, the was probably a jerk and the officer probably overreacted. When they got to the station and they said what had happened, the officer's superiors probably contacted REI and Loomis to see if they were filing charges for anything. REI and Loomis lawyers probably said there wasn't anything they could file charges for, and REI probably said the guy was banned from the store. At this point, the superiors probably told the officer to let the writer go, and sent then sat the officer down to tell them that it's not illegal to take pictures in the store, and possibly an admonition to be more level headed in the future. Then a little note was probably added to their file mentioning the incident.
Would this have been enough? In my opinion, probably. But, I don't like to pass judgment because I have seen way too many situations where someone thinks they know what happened, but are missing the one tiny piece of evidence that makes them completely wrong.
I'm not really sure how it's supposed to be my fault. I've never been in a situation where I would need to challenge some wrong being committed against me. I also support people that do have to challenge the system, and legislation that has a chance of fixing it. The point of my comment was that it is incorrect to assume that "the right way" is the way things are currently done.
Calling me spineless is uncalled for.
(Incidentally, Texas is not an open carry state. I've taken the concealed handgun course, but I'm not going to start wearing an exposed gun to protest. I'm also not going to wear one to work where it is illegal in a court of law to protest. There is a proper time, place, and way to oppose laws.)
I would refer you to the Wikipedia article on the Stanford Prison Experiment:
The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Those selected were chosen for their lack of psychological issues, crime history, and medical disabilities, in order to obtain a representative sample. Roles were assigned based on a coin toss.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After being confronted by Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating,[2] and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become too grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.
Six days is all it took for a significant number of well educated and stable people to "exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies" when placed in a position of power over others. Most of the officers I've met are genuinely good guys, and some of them have always wanted to help other and uphold the peace. But a lot of them just ended up as police officers for whatever reason. They are highly trained to place themselves in stressful and dangerous situations and take charge. That some of them get big heads and/or become corrupt isn't exactly surprising.
Police officers do need our support and understanding. But it's also important to call out inappropriate behavior before it devolves into something dangerous.
All of that is really how it "should be", not so much how it is. For instance, a "disturbing the peace" charge can be used for all sorts of things. Step out of line once, and they may charge you just because. Sure you might be able to get it dismissed, but it's a huge hassle, and quite possibly costly, while the officer can just shrug his shoulders and be on his way.
Sadly, you are unlikely to win a lawsuit for asking your neighbors questions, or for just about anything else. All the officer needs to say is "he was involved in suspicious activity, and I was following leads." And while it is possible to garner national attention, usually all you get is a 5 minute spotlight in the local news that everyone has forgotten by the next day.
Trust me, it's worth it to be nice.
Just to be clear, police officers also need a clear cause to draw their weapon on you.
Also, any police department worth their salt will have forms the police officer must fill out describing why they drew their weapon, as well as interviews from superiors. Some departments require a small amount of leave if the weapon is actually discharged. Making sure your officers know when to draw their weapons is a good thing.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of crappy and corrupt police departments out there.
I do IT for a small city, which includes a police department. I get the opportunity to chat with the police folk about any number of things they've encountered, and there are two very important things to remember.
1. There are any number of mundane and ambiguously worded laws that they can use to arrest you resulting in fines or jail time.
2. There is a lot that an officer can do that is rather harassing, but perfectly within their legal rights to do. For instance, the ATM photo guy, they could go around and ask all of his neighbors about him, and if he's been known to have been involved in any thefts or illegal activities. It can be inconvenient for all of your neighbors to suddenly suspect the worst of you.
There is no legal requirement to be nice to police officers (or anyone else around you), but you may find your life a lot better if you do.
If I had mod points, I'd mod this Informative.
When my brother bought his house, some time afterwards he had a list of things to fix. Most of it was pretty simple stuff, like a squeaky step, but he ended up having about 20 people come over that each specialized in a very specific type of fix. He was very satisfied with the builder's production quality as well as fixing things so not all builders are bad.
Our new building at work is a disaster of building. It's too late to be able to fix most of the issues without gutting the building, and the organization ended up just signing for the building because it would be more cost effective to have others come in to fix it. Pretty terrible really.
No, multiple accounts of grand theft auto in Texas and Colorado. Hmmm... The plot thickens.
So long as these cheap apartments follow international building code
I had no idea, but there apparently is an international building code. Granted, it's not law in many places, but it is interesting still.
Yeah, limiting the scope to a time period would certainly be more useful.
I had one friend growing up that's in prison, and I know he played paintball once. So far in my tests 100% of prisoners play paintball. I guess I should work on increasing my sample size now.
Two men enter, one man leave. Where is Tina Turner when you need her?
From various exposes and such that I've seen on TV, it seems to be a quick cash method for the lazy that end up a large percentage of their profits just using drugs. Much like people involved in petty theft, or stealing copper cables to be sold. Sure you could make more money by just going and getting a job at McDonalds, but they lack the self discipline to actually show up to a job.
(I don't know if things are really being portrayed properly or not, but that is how it is shown.)
I'm sorry, feel the sting of being shot? Paintballs leave welts. Gunshots leave holes. That doesn't just "sting".
So? He's talking specifically about close rang combat. The motivation for not getting shot in a video game is pretty low because you can just start again the next round. The same thing happens in laser tag. In paintball you're a bit more cautious because getting shot at close range with a 300fps ball of paint hurts, even through a few layers of clothing.
Maybe if they made the controller to first person shooters deliver an electric shock when being shot people would be more cautious and would have a similar effect?