MP4 [...] is only one which is open, free and platform independent.
MP4 is neither open nor free, but I guess one out of three isn't bad. It is, however, an ISO standard. You have to pay $$$ for the specifications, and $$$ for licenses to encoders/decoders, but beyond that it's fairly platform independent in that people have illegally obtained the specifications and written parsers/decoders that other people are using on many platforms. I would much rather Ogg/MKV/Vorbis and some good open video codec obtain some traction than MP4.
IIRC the ISS was originally supposed to have a big rotating ring for some artificial gravity. After budget cuts and cost overruns, the ISS is a mere shadow of it's planned glory. If they couldn't construct something like that in low Earth orbit, I have my doubts that they'd be able to get it all the way to the moon.
Wow, those are some really interesting links. I had no idea that NIH did studies like that.
A room of diameter 15 feet would require about 19rpm to produce the 1G. A 10rpm room would need to be 54ft in diameter. Building a rotating room 54 ft in diameter on the moon wouldn't exactly be a cake walk. It is certainly possible, but not something that's likely to happen anytime in the early years.
If you are only rotating a room used for sleeping, then it only needs to be a few meters across to accommodate at 10 people. It would be almost identical to those whirly rides at carnivals that make you stick to the walls and the floor drops out. The only reasons that some people get motion sickness on those is that they mentally know that they are rotating, and they can often see a stationary point like the center or the roof. For a room, you would just make the only stationary point the entry hatch to the room at the center, and all other points would be stationary to people within the room.
My math is a bit rusty, but I think it might work like this. To provide 10 people with a space 4 feet wide on the outside, you would need a circular room 13 feet in diameter (C=2pi*r). It might need to be bigger to ensure that there isn't to great of a degree of difference of force for parts of the body depending on distance from the center of the room, but let's start small.
The moon has about 1/6 the gravitational pull of the Earth (0.17G) (why is Earth capitalized and moon isn't?). So we can use that to help with the wall. To create a force of 1G, perpendicular to the out wall, we angle the top of the outer wall out about 9 degrees (cos(x)=adjacent/hypotenuse). And we need to create an outward force of about 0.986G (a^2+b^2=c^2).
I can't remember what the equation to figure out the needed rotational speed, but it can't be that much.
I response was snide for your snide response, a response that did nothing to change the premise or conclusion of my post. My numbers were correct, for an absolute best possible case scenario, which may not be feasible, but were 'good enough' for the discussion. And I posted the numbers so that people would understand where I got them and correct them if necessary. Correcting them is fine, it's being snide when you do it that earns a snide response.
If the sealant mixes with the dust, mostly acting as a binding agent, then it would be far more space efficient. Take glue, mix with dirt, spread over surface. Most of the sealants volume would then be native dirt, which is exceptionally plentiful.
If I remember my pioneer field trip correctly, you can do this with blood. Pioneers would slaughter a cow inside of a home with a dirt floor, then mix the blood around with the dirt. When it dried it was very much like hard rock. Maybe you could just shoot astronauts up there and never worry about bringing them back. When they died, use their blood to seal the dust around the hatch. Sure it's creepy, but it might just be cost effective enough for congress to approve it.
We don't even know if 1/6 gravity will have serious health effects until we actually try it out, so for the moment it's all supposition. There may not even be a problem. At the worst it'd be about the same as zero G, at the best a person could live there for years. Though just building a rotating sleeping quarters to produce artificial Earth level gravity would provide 8 hours of time for to help slow down any deterioration of bone mass, extending stay time even further. If it's even needed.
Yeah, it's estimated calories consumed by my body. I was assuming 100% efficient energy conversion by my body, the exercise equipment, and generating equipment, which is of course not really possible. Thankfully, with your corrections I can change my conclusion from "never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view" all the way to "never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view". Without your clarification, this simply wouldn't have been possible and the error would have been cemented in cyberspace history forever.
Someone cracked the XP/2003 private key used to sign product keys. The valid space is actually much smaller than that. You can read about it more here.
The character "-" does not contain any information, so, the MS product key is composed of 25-digit-character. Microsoft only uses "BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789" to encode product key, in order to avoid ambiguous characters (e.g. "I" and "1", "0" and "O"). The quantity of information that a product key contain is at most log(s)24^25 ~ 114bits. The decoded result can be divided into 12bit + 31bit + 62bit + 9bit, and we call theses 4 parts 12bit: OS Family, 31bit: Hash, 62bit: Signature, and 9bit: Prefix.
Unless they changed the way that keys work with Vista, they could probably do this exact same crack over again and get the new private key. That would make generating new 'valid' keys instantaneous. The problem is that the space is so big that the chances of a collision between a 'valid' key and one MS actually issues is tiny, and because they know every key they ever issued, they can still tell pretty quickly if you are using a valid key or not.
It isn't the 'latest' hurdle, it's just the biggest. At least it's the biggest for any colony that expects to go outside every no and again.
Note that we were discussing having the colony already on the moon, not getting it there. The biggest problem with anything outside of our planet is getting there, what with all of that pesky gravity keeping us here. But even that is less of a technical issue and more of a financial one. In fact, an underground base lacks most of the issues of an above ground one, such as radiation and rapid extreme temperature swings. The only other problems are keeping supplies and oxygen stocked (a supply transportation issue which is again mostly financial) and the wear on the base due to moon dust.
Earth is in a completely different issue because of higher gravity, the availability of atmosphere to blow/suck the dust away and into filters, and the lack of need of maintaining air tight seals against a vacuum. Every other issue is a matter of how much you want to spend to transport stuff to and from the moon.
One solution, which sounds and feels a bit retarded, would be to seal the ground anywhere around hatches and where the astronauts need to go. Some sort of spray sealant, flexible enough not handle walking on, quick solidifying, and resistant to the extreme temperatures. A thin layer on the ground everywhere they walked would prevent most dust from getting on them, reducing the amount that gets inside the base, in the seals, air, walkways, etc. A new coating could be applied regularly to patch holes and trap dust that got on top of the previous layer. Of course, ignoring the technical issues, this would still have a host of other issues.
I have a feeing that a proper moon base won't be particularly viable or useful until robotics and computing becomes more advanced. It would be best to be able to send robots there ahead of us to assemble the entire moon base. A sufficiently advanced set could construct a massive array of solar panels using mostly the raw materials on the moon's surface. Signal delay would require quite a bit of automation on their part. An even more advanced set could repair themselves and create new parts from the available raw materials. Once the automation reaches a certain point, you could move humans right in to do more interesting things like researching how to create a portal to hell, so that marines can be sent in to save them.
I pay $33/month for my membership, and there is no way I come anywhere close to $3 in generation, it's probably less than $1. I'd rather have the cost of the electricity generation equipment be recycled into replacing/fixing older equipment faster. The cost of the generation equipment would never pay for itself, would introduce more points of failure, and would increase the amount of time equipment had to be in service for.
Where I live (Austin, TX) the rate for residential is 3.55 per kWh, first 500 kWh and 6.02 per kWh, for all kWh over 500 kWh. According to this page we can use a rate of 1 calorie per 1 watt hour. According to the elliptical machine at the gym, I burn through about 1000 calories in the first hour of cardio. It's probably pretty safe to assume that we're going to use at least 500kWh, so we can figure at the premium scale.
That means that in an hour I could produce about 1kWh or energy for a grand total of $0.0602 worth of electricity. That's not very encouraging. That wouldn't even pay for the air conditioning to cool me down (I am like a furnace of passion and desire).
I suspect that if I really wanted to (and was less concerned about my health), I could probably burn through 2000 calories in 2.5-3 hours. If I did that every day for a month, that would still only be about $3.61 worth of electricity. I have a feeling that this will never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view.
The main problem with inflatable shelters on the Moon is micrometeorites, and the lack of a significant atmosphere to stop them.
It would be the main problem if they were going to bury them, but burying them only makes sense to protect from meteorites AND radiation. But it doesn't protect it from the other main problem, dirt.
The biggest problem with a colony the moon is moon dust. Due to the lack of atmosphere and running water, lunar dust is extremely jagged (compared to Earth dust that is pretty well rounded). As these structures shift around in the dirt, this dust will be scratching away at them. As the airlocks open and close, the dust will be wearing away at the seals. Read about the astronauts experiences. The dust sticks to EVERYTHING. Anytime someone goes outside they will track in more dust, which will coat surfaces and get in the air. And people thought asbestos was bad...
Open Source Definition, which does state that if a license is to be OSI certified, it must allow modification and redistribution under the same license.
I've met a number of people that make the distinction between "open source" and "source available". "Source available" simply means that you can view the source code, but not redistribute it, or not compile and distribute the binaries.
HTML4, and even more so XHTML, most certainly have all of the block/inline information well defined in the spec. It may not be very readable, but it is all there. What isn't there are default values for stuff like padding and margins. One of the results of this is that Firefox and Internet Explorer have different methods to indent list items, and both are technically correct.
That said, there are a number of features in any basic word processor that simply aren't feasible to get done. Granted most of these would work much better in a real typesetting program, but your average user really just needs/wants what is offered in Word/etc.
Okay, my humor may be just a little bit dry for Slashdot. Obviously the eyes are an analog system without any sort of direct correlation to megapixels. I guess I could have left that last bit off. I was just extending the original parent's joke as far as I could. The telescope is pointing at space and collecting an enormous amount of data. The original parent said that to collect such little data the user would have to stare into space. It was a counter argument joke.
The telescope will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night.
To see how this does work out in the US check out UTOPIA. A coalition of cities in Utah got together and made a plan for laying out fiber to every home and business. A few quick points about it:
The government owns the fiber but does not offer any services directly. Instead other businesses offer internet, phone, and TV services through it.
15Mbps up/down connections available from $40/month (less than the $60 I pay for 5Mbps/384Kbps), or 30Mbps from $125/month.
Connections are standard 100Mbps, but can be requested as 1000Mbps.
The UTOPIA is faster and more flexible than Verizon's FIOS system. (Verizon uses a passive optical network while UTOPIA uses your typical actively switched setup.)
Every report I've read from a user has been positive. Overwhelmingly positive.
I am mostly libertarian, but even I can see the current setup is completely broken. Broadband is no necessary to infrastructure that it would make sense now to have the government build it out like they did with the roads. It would be expensive, but at least it would be done, and that is what we need.
Figuring out who has permissions is significantly easier than you're making it out to be. The two things thrown in to intentionally confuse readers are:
including possibly-contradictory local
and inherited permissions
1 is not the problem people often think because of a rule used to simplify 'contradictory' permissions. Namely, "Deny permissions always trump anything else." So take a look at any deny permissions, and no matter what any of the other permissions say, you know that nobody in the deny permissions has access to the folder.
2 appears to be in place to confuse the reader. Inherited permissions are always displayed in the security tab. There isn't any guessing as to if there is some sort of "unknown inherited permission". It's essentially a non-issue.
Honestly, I don't know how people get by with simply Unix style permissions in a corporate environment. The simplest scenario I see all the time is there is a directory that I want one group of users to have read access to, another to have write access to, and a subset of the two groups to be denied access.
If I had to point to one aspect of Windows ACLs that are confusing, it's the way that share permissions and file permissions overlap. A share can have whatever permissions, and the files themselves can have another set of permissions entirely. Sometimes resolving between the two can be a bit confusing. Generally, relaxing share permissions, and depending on file permissions makes things easy, while keeping it safe.
So, when people say "Ogg Vorbis" what they're actually referring to is a Vorbis audio stream inside an Ogg container. Presumably, it's possible to have a file with a raw Vorbis bitstream (without the Ogg container)
It is also possible to have Vorbis in Matroska, though I've never heard it referred to as Matroska Vorbis. This is truly confusing for the average consumer, and probably a big obstacle to adoption.
I'm pretty certain that Michael Dell is being brought back to keep the stockholders happy and to attempt to restore the image. Few people will remember that he made the company the way it is, and I feel that Kevin Rollins is taking the scapegoat role.
Yeah, I think this about says it all:
During Rollins' tenure, Dell was battered by a recall of 4.1 million potentially flammable notebook batteries made by Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news). and by disappointing earnings.
How exactly does anyone plan for that? The entire industry had to recall Sony batteries, not something that anyone could have predicted. And it should be noted that Dell was about the first to announce a recall on the same explosive batteries that everyone was using. There was a reason Kevin Rollins was picked to lead Dell, he is an excellent business man. If he has a shortcoming, it's that he has ethics too.
Still, I'm with you on the customer service thing. One of the reasons everyone used to buy Dells is that their computers were rated at least "Good" and their customer service was the best in the industry. Now if you've got anything other than a large corporate account you're going to be talking to someone in India that you can't understand, and that has no idea what's going on. "Why do you want me to hook this monitor to another computer if it has lines on it when it's not hooked to any computer?"
(Disclaimer: I work IT for a small city including a police department on a regular basis. I have a LOT first had experience with the stupidity from both the police and public.)
First: Just last week I watched videos of officers getting tasered (projectiles with thin wires attached are shot from a 'gun' into the skin and an electrical current passes through overriding the bodies nerve response). There were probably 50 different officers receiving it for a mandatory total of 5 seconds each. The responses of the officers varied greatly from just freezing and falling over like a log to flopping around a bit. Some even pissed or crapped their pants. But without exception they could all move again within a few seconds, apparently without much disorientation. Removing the fired pins took less than 10 seconds and they were standing and appeared to be fine. They described getting shocked as becoming completely "out of it" during the shock, almost like blacking out, but as soon as the shock was done, they were basically fine.
What the UCLA officers appeared to be using was a 'stun gun' (two metal knobs that are placed in contact with the skin or though clothing and deliver the same kind of shock) that is used to deliver what is sometimes called a 'dry taze'. There were also some of these on the video. The are described as far less effective than the 'wet taze' (I'm guessing due to the added resistance of skin and clothing). It is more like a punch than the incapacitating nature of a normal taser.
Tasers and stun guns come in many different flavors, but most police departments use what was displayed in the video I saw. Chances are the UCLA officers were using what I saw, and chances are the person being tasered could move within a few seconds, or at least stop resisting.
Second: What people say happened, and what really happened are usually two very different things. I don't know if it is poor memory, the anxiety of the moment, a desire for something different, their mind filling in the gaps of things they couldn't see, or just plain ole deceit, but people are constantly giving the wrong account. I have to pull videos and burn DVDs for evidence all the time, and they rarely show what someone is claiming. In the past year, not a single complaint against our department has held because we got some fancy new digital video recorders with wireless microphones on the officers. They've done some pretty stupid stuff that's been caught on video, but nothing against the law or against another citizen. I would guess that half of the reports of police brutality on a campus are completely accurate with officer overstepping the bounds and should be placed in jail. The other half I think is just the student mind's wishful thinking to have had an experience where they were "put down by the man" just because they were starting fires on campus...
If the entire incident isn't viewable on video with decent audio, then you really can't be sure what happened.
Third: Is everyone watching a different video than I watched? I watched the entire thing, and save for about 10 seconds, all I ever saw was crowds and computer monitors. Even the audio was crappy with barely a few lines being made out. There was one point where you can see him being dragged with the officers saying "you will get tasered again if you do not stand up." That is the only questionable part of the video that I could see, or really the only vaguely clear part. The problem is you don't know if the guy was threatening the officers, or trying to bite them. Maybe he was trying to kick them? Who knows? I know nobody here knows if that is the only video they saw. Some clear video looks pretty damning until you see another angle to see what is actually happening.
In most areas, if a suspect is in handcuffs, is not actively preventing himself from being moved, and he can be moved, then they cannot be tasered. From the video, it looks like this was the case, and if it was, then the officers would certainly face disciplinar
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MP4 is neither open nor free, but I guess one out of three isn't bad. It is, however, an ISO standard. You have to pay $$$ for the specifications, and $$$ for licenses to encoders/decoders, but beyond that it's fairly platform independent in that people have illegally obtained the specifications and written parsers/decoders that other people are using on many platforms. I would much rather Ogg/MKV/Vorbis and some good open video codec obtain some traction than MP4.
IIRC the ISS was originally supposed to have a big rotating ring for some artificial gravity. After budget cuts and cost overruns, the ISS is a mere shadow of it's planned glory. If they couldn't construct something like that in low Earth orbit, I have my doubts that they'd be able to get it all the way to the moon.
Wow, those are some really interesting links. I had no idea that NIH did studies like that.
A room of diameter 15 feet would require about 19rpm to produce the 1G. A 10rpm room would need to be 54ft in diameter. Building a rotating room 54 ft in diameter on the moon wouldn't exactly be a cake walk. It is certainly possible, but not something that's likely to happen anytime in the early years.
If you are only rotating a room used for sleeping, then it only needs to be a few meters across to accommodate at 10 people. It would be almost identical to those whirly rides at carnivals that make you stick to the walls and the floor drops out. The only reasons that some people get motion sickness on those is that they mentally know that they are rotating, and they can often see a stationary point like the center or the roof. For a room, you would just make the only stationary point the entry hatch to the room at the center, and all other points would be stationary to people within the room.
My math is a bit rusty, but I think it might work like this. To provide 10 people with a space 4 feet wide on the outside, you would need a circular room 13 feet in diameter (C=2pi*r). It might need to be bigger to ensure that there isn't to great of a degree of difference of force for parts of the body depending on distance from the center of the room, but let's start small.
The moon has about 1/6 the gravitational pull of the Earth (0.17G) (why is Earth capitalized and moon isn't?). So we can use that to help with the wall. To create a force of 1G, perpendicular to the out wall, we angle the top of the outer wall out about 9 degrees (cos(x)=adjacent/hypotenuse). And we need to create an outward force of about 0.986G (a^2+b^2=c^2).
I can't remember what the equation to figure out the needed rotational speed, but it can't be that much.
I response was snide for your snide response, a response that did nothing to change the premise or conclusion of my post. My numbers were correct, for an absolute best possible case scenario, which may not be feasible, but were 'good enough' for the discussion. And I posted the numbers so that people would understand where I got them and correct them if necessary. Correcting them is fine, it's being snide when you do it that earns a snide response.
If the sealant mixes with the dust, mostly acting as a binding agent, then it would be far more space efficient. Take glue, mix with dirt, spread over surface. Most of the sealants volume would then be native dirt, which is exceptionally plentiful.
If I remember my pioneer field trip correctly, you can do this with blood. Pioneers would slaughter a cow inside of a home with a dirt floor, then mix the blood around with the dirt. When it dried it was very much like hard rock. Maybe you could just shoot astronauts up there and never worry about bringing them back. When they died, use their blood to seal the dust around the hatch. Sure it's creepy, but it might just be cost effective enough for congress to approve it.
We don't even know if 1/6 gravity will have serious health effects until we actually try it out, so for the moment it's all supposition. There may not even be a problem. At the worst it'd be about the same as zero G, at the best a person could live there for years. Though just building a rotating sleeping quarters to produce artificial Earth level gravity would provide 8 hours of time for to help slow down any deterioration of bone mass, extending stay time even further. If it's even needed.
Yeah, it's estimated calories consumed by my body. I was assuming 100% efficient energy conversion by my body, the exercise equipment, and generating equipment, which is of course not really possible. Thankfully, with your corrections I can change my conclusion from "never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view" all the way to "never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view". Without your clarification, this simply wouldn't have been possible and the error would have been cemented in cyberspace history forever.
Someone cracked the XP/2003 private key used to sign product keys. The valid space is actually much smaller than that. You can read about it more here.
Unless they changed the way that keys work with Vista, they could probably do this exact same crack over again and get the new private key. That would make generating new 'valid' keys instantaneous. The problem is that the space is so big that the chances of a collision between a 'valid' key and one MS actually issues is tiny, and because they know every key they ever issued, they can still tell pretty quickly if you are using a valid key or not.
It isn't the 'latest' hurdle, it's just the biggest. At least it's the biggest for any colony that expects to go outside every no and again.
Note that we were discussing having the colony already on the moon, not getting it there. The biggest problem with anything outside of our planet is getting there, what with all of that pesky gravity keeping us here. But even that is less of a technical issue and more of a financial one. In fact, an underground base lacks most of the issues of an above ground one, such as radiation and rapid extreme temperature swings. The only other problems are keeping supplies and oxygen stocked (a supply transportation issue which is again mostly financial) and the wear on the base due to moon dust.
Earth is in a completely different issue because of higher gravity, the availability of atmosphere to blow/suck the dust away and into filters, and the lack of need of maintaining air tight seals against a vacuum. Every other issue is a matter of how much you want to spend to transport stuff to and from the moon.
One solution, which sounds and feels a bit retarded, would be to seal the ground anywhere around hatches and where the astronauts need to go. Some sort of spray sealant, flexible enough not handle walking on, quick solidifying, and resistant to the extreme temperatures. A thin layer on the ground everywhere they walked would prevent most dust from getting on them, reducing the amount that gets inside the base, in the seals, air, walkways, etc. A new coating could be applied regularly to patch holes and trap dust that got on top of the previous layer. Of course, ignoring the technical issues, this would still have a host of other issues.
I have a feeing that a proper moon base won't be particularly viable or useful until robotics and computing becomes more advanced. It would be best to be able to send robots there ahead of us to assemble the entire moon base. A sufficiently advanced set could construct a massive array of solar panels using mostly the raw materials on the moon's surface. Signal delay would require quite a bit of automation on their part. An even more advanced set could repair themselves and create new parts from the available raw materials. Once the automation reaches a certain point, you could move humans right in to do more interesting things like researching how to create a portal to hell, so that marines can be sent in to save them.
I pay $33/month for my membership, and there is no way I come anywhere close to $3 in generation, it's probably less than $1. I'd rather have the cost of the electricity generation equipment be recycled into replacing/fixing older equipment faster. The cost of the generation equipment would never pay for itself, would introduce more points of failure, and would increase the amount of time equipment had to be in service for.
Where I live (Austin, TX) the rate for residential is 3.55 per kWh, first 500 kWh and 6.02 per kWh, for all kWh over 500 kWh. According to this page we can use a rate of 1 calorie per 1 watt hour. According to the elliptical machine at the gym, I burn through about 1000 calories in the first hour of cardio. It's probably pretty safe to assume that we're going to use at least 500kWh, so we can figure at the premium scale.
That means that in an hour I could produce about 1kWh or energy for a grand total of $0.0602 worth of electricity. That's not very encouraging. That wouldn't even pay for the air conditioning to cool me down (I am like a furnace of passion and desire).
I suspect that if I really wanted to (and was less concerned about my health), I could probably burn through 2000 calories in 2.5-3 hours. If I did that every day for a month, that would still only be about $3.61 worth of electricity. I have a feeling that this will never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view.
Let me add a few more
That's all that comes off the top of my head, but I'm sure that someone who actually took time to think about it could come up with more.
It would be the main problem if they were going to bury them, but burying them only makes sense to protect from meteorites AND radiation. But it doesn't protect it from the other main problem, dirt.
The biggest problem with a colony the moon is moon dust. Due to the lack of atmosphere and running water, lunar dust is extremely jagged (compared to Earth dust that is pretty well rounded). As these structures shift around in the dirt, this dust will be scratching away at them. As the airlocks open and close, the dust will be wearing away at the seals. Read about the astronauts experiences. The dust sticks to EVERYTHING. Anytime someone goes outside they will track in more dust, which will coat surfaces and get in the air. And people thought asbestos was bad...
I've met a number of people that make the distinction between "open source" and "source available". "Source available" simply means that you can view the source code, but not redistribute it, or not compile and distribute the binaries.
Eh? So much for freedom of religion?
HTML4, and even more so XHTML, most certainly have all of the block/inline information well defined in the spec. It may not be very readable, but it is all there. What isn't there are default values for stuff like padding and margins. One of the results of this is that Firefox and Internet Explorer have different methods to indent list items, and both are technically correct.
That said, there are a number of features in any basic word processor that simply aren't feasible to get done. Granted most of these would work much better in a real typesetting program, but your average user really just needs/wants what is offered in Word/etc.
Okay, my humor may be just a little bit dry for Slashdot. Obviously the eyes are an analog system without any sort of direct correlation to megapixels. I guess I could have left that last bit off. I was just extending the original parent's joke as far as I could. The telescope is pointing at space and collecting an enormous amount of data. The original parent said that to collect such little data the user would have to stare into space. It was a counter argument joke.
If he was looking up into space, he'd be getting a heck of a lot more than 18GB. The human eye gets the equivalent of around 600 million pixels.
To see how this does work out in the US check out UTOPIA. A coalition of cities in Utah got together and made a plan for laying out fiber to every home and business. A few quick points about it:
I am mostly libertarian, but even I can see the current setup is completely broken. Broadband is no necessary to infrastructure that it would make sense now to have the government build it out like they did with the roads. It would be expensive, but at least it would be done, and that is what we need.
Figuring out who has permissions is significantly easier than you're making it out to be. The two things thrown in to intentionally confuse readers are:
1 is not the problem people often think because of a rule used to simplify 'contradictory' permissions. Namely, "Deny permissions always trump anything else." So take a look at any deny permissions, and no matter what any of the other permissions say, you know that nobody in the deny permissions has access to the folder.
2 appears to be in place to confuse the reader. Inherited permissions are always displayed in the security tab. There isn't any guessing as to if there is some sort of "unknown inherited permission". It's essentially a non-issue.
Honestly, I don't know how people get by with simply Unix style permissions in a corporate environment. The simplest scenario I see all the time is there is a directory that I want one group of users to have read access to, another to have write access to, and a subset of the two groups to be denied access.
If I had to point to one aspect of Windows ACLs that are confusing, it's the way that share permissions and file permissions overlap. A share can have whatever permissions, and the files themselves can have another set of permissions entirely. Sometimes resolving between the two can be a bit confusing. Generally, relaxing share permissions, and depending on file permissions makes things easy, while keeping it safe.
It is also possible to have Vorbis in Matroska, though I've never heard it referred to as Matroska Vorbis. This is truly confusing for the average consumer, and probably a big obstacle to adoption.
Yeah, I think this about says it all:
How exactly does anyone plan for that? The entire industry had to recall Sony batteries, not something that anyone could have predicted. And it should be noted that Dell was about the first to announce a recall on the same explosive batteries that everyone was using. There was a reason Kevin Rollins was picked to lead Dell, he is an excellent business man. If he has a shortcoming, it's that he has ethics too.
Still, I'm with you on the customer service thing. One of the reasons everyone used to buy Dells is that their computers were rated at least "Good" and their customer service was the best in the industry. Now if you've got anything other than a large corporate account you're going to be talking to someone in India that you can't understand, and that has no idea what's going on. "Why do you want me to hook this monitor to another computer if it has lines on it when it's not hooked to any computer?"
This is a "United States District Judge" in Texas, not a Texas judge. Not quite the same thing.
(Disclaimer: I work IT for a small city including a police department on a regular basis. I have a LOT first had experience with the stupidity from both the police and public.)
First: Just last week I watched videos of officers getting tasered (projectiles with thin wires attached are shot from a 'gun' into the skin and an electrical current passes through overriding the bodies nerve response). There were probably 50 different officers receiving it for a mandatory total of 5 seconds each. The responses of the officers varied greatly from just freezing and falling over like a log to flopping around a bit. Some even pissed or crapped their pants. But without exception they could all move again within a few seconds, apparently without much disorientation. Removing the fired pins took less than 10 seconds and they were standing and appeared to be fine. They described getting shocked as becoming completely "out of it" during the shock, almost like blacking out, but as soon as the shock was done, they were basically fine.
What the UCLA officers appeared to be using was a 'stun gun' (two metal knobs that are placed in contact with the skin or though clothing and deliver the same kind of shock) that is used to deliver what is sometimes called a 'dry taze'. There were also some of these on the video. The are described as far less effective than the 'wet taze' (I'm guessing due to the added resistance of skin and clothing). It is more like a punch than the incapacitating nature of a normal taser.
Tasers and stun guns come in many different flavors, but most police departments use what was displayed in the video I saw. Chances are the UCLA officers were using what I saw, and chances are the person being tasered could move within a few seconds, or at least stop resisting.
Second: What people say happened, and what really happened are usually two very different things. I don't know if it is poor memory, the anxiety of the moment, a desire for something different, their mind filling in the gaps of things they couldn't see, or just plain ole deceit, but people are constantly giving the wrong account. I have to pull videos and burn DVDs for evidence all the time, and they rarely show what someone is claiming. In the past year, not a single complaint against our department has held because we got some fancy new digital video recorders with wireless microphones on the officers. They've done some pretty stupid stuff that's been caught on video, but nothing against the law or against another citizen. I would guess that half of the reports of police brutality on a campus are completely accurate with officer overstepping the bounds and should be placed in jail. The other half I think is just the student mind's wishful thinking to have had an experience where they were "put down by the man" just because they were starting fires on campus...
If the entire incident isn't viewable on video with decent audio, then you really can't be sure what happened.
Third: Is everyone watching a different video than I watched? I watched the entire thing, and save for about 10 seconds, all I ever saw was crowds and computer monitors. Even the audio was crappy with barely a few lines being made out. There was one point where you can see him being dragged with the officers saying "you will get tasered again if you do not stand up." That is the only questionable part of the video that I could see, or really the only vaguely clear part. The problem is you don't know if the guy was threatening the officers, or trying to bite them. Maybe he was trying to kick them? Who knows? I know nobody here knows if that is the only video they saw. Some clear video looks pretty damning until you see another angle to see what is actually happening.
In most areas, if a suspect is in handcuffs, is not actively preventing himself from being moved, and he can be moved, then they cannot be tasered. From the video, it looks like this was the case, and if it was, then the officers would certainly face disciplinar