It's also an attempt at fuel economy. People are told not to work down through the gears, and instead to brake and change down to the correct gear. If you live somewhere with a lot of roundabouts, then you get all these people coming up to them who are not in a position to accelerate correctly, and hence can't pull out into a suitable size gap. So they come storming up to the roundabout, slam their brakes on at the last second (scaring the shit out of motorcyclists, because every time someone does that I have to assume they haven't seen me and are just going for it), before stopping, changing to first and starting again.
If they were in a position to control the vehicle they could accelerate or decelerate to manoeuvre safely onto the roundabout either ahead or behind existing traffic. Of course that would also mean they have to look slightly earlier than at the last possible moment, but you can't have everything
Also have you ever been in a car with someone who does the official 'shuffle' steering all the bloody time, even when they're making a reasonably sharp turn? The combination of responsive power steering, repeated jerky movements and the fact that they are barely turning fast enough for the manoeuvre they are attempting is not confidence inspiring. Finally a lot of people _do_ drive fast, and I think it would be better if they were slightly more aware of how to control it (for example people who get halfway round a corner, realise they are going faster than they like, and slam the brakes on) and where the limits are (turns out that you will leave the road and end up in a ditch if you push your luck)
I might be getting the physics wrong, but I thought that most performance cars had a 0-60 time that was greater than the 60-0 time, suggesting that the brakes can convert KE to heat quicker than the engine can convert fuel to KE.
I think that some judgement is necessary. The UK police are driven entirely by targets (rather than the interest of the community) which means that they are desperate for arrests. If you are arrested for something then being a reasonable person, 'helping them out', 'making it easier for yourself' etc. (e.g. answering questions or making statements in the absence of legal counsel) is a way of them shoring up their case against you without some pesky lawyer stopping you from incriminating yourself.
Contrast this with people who have regular dealings with the police, and know the system and how to minimise what the police can do to them. In an ideal world some common sense would be used (and apparently was once) and someone who has otherwise been an upstanding member of the community would not have the book thrown at them by the police, whilst someone who was a regular trouble maker would have a more determined effort to seek prosecution made. This is not the case, and if you are cooperative etc. that just means that you are making it easier for them to add a couple of other charges.
Obviously if you have done nothing wrong (as the poster above) then help them out because they know a waste of time when they see it, and they've got those damn targets to meet. But if you have done something, then it really is in your best interests to make sure that you only get prosecuted for what you have actually done, not for what you somehow admitted to when you were helpfully answering questions. It's like the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. One is legal and nigh on encouraged, the other isn't. Like tax, if a prosecution is inevitable, that doesn't mean you're going to go out and look for as much of it as possible does it?
It is a shame that this is the state of affairs, but the police are not around to use common sense these days. I have friends who are police officers, who have been told that 'we've solved enough rape cases this month, we need to catch up on shoplifters'. Because that's what the community they would serve wants - numbers that add up - not for perhaps some violent sexual assailant to be jailed, but for some kids who stole some sweets to be put through the grinder.
So as I understand it - from what I thought was 'if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court' you should make sure that you mention in a police interview anything that you may wish to mention in court. Am I right in presuming that you are entitled to a solicitor during a police interview?
Wikipedia seems to back this up - "Adverse inferences may be drawn in certain circumstances where before or on being charged, the accused fails to mention a specific fact which he later relies upon and which in the circumstances at the time the accused could reasonably be expected to mention. If this failure occurs at an authorised place of detention (e.g. a police station), no inferences can be drawn from any failure occurring before the accused is allowed an opportunity to consult a legal advisor. Section 34 of the 1994 reverses the common law position that such failures could not be relied upon." - so basically there should be no prejudice if you don't answer or state anything until you have a lawyer present, but if you decide to mention it in court having not mentioned it during police questioning then the jury may infer that there was some reason or motive for you not mentioning it earlier
To be fair this seems pretty reasonable. However if I get arrested I will not be answering any questions until a solicitor is present. A friend of mine was arrested, and was treated respectfully by the police, assured that answering questions now would make everything easier later etc. etc. and then when he came to court all his statements are read out by the officers, out of context and with their 'interpretation' of his meaning, needless to say not to his benefit. Hardly seems like the reasonable actions they promised. In the unlikely event that I get arrested I will not be answering anything until I have some legal advice present, since it seems that without such advice the treatment received by someone who does not know the 'system' from the police is somewhat unfair.
I have a lot of respect for the police and the job they do, however it is eroded by behaviour such as this, which attempts to take essentially law abiding and honest people to the cleaners because they don't know how to get away with things unlike the chavs who are in the nick every week and know every trick to make life difficult for the police
You hook a lightbulb up to a solar panel, and it will keep glowing forever. Obviously this has to be done in a completely sealed box so that none of the light escapes, so you are forbidden from checking that the light is still glowing.
Some would say it's useless, but it improves the quality of life of physicists' cats quite dramatically.
We've got something like this in the UK, and I'm sure there are plenty of other places that have them. You can't make a transaction without getting the correct cryptographic response from the card using the card reader. Here's a picture: http://www.nationwide.co.uk/rca/How-does-it-work/find.htm
I don't like the sound of a USB type device, because it seems that there is some possibility it could be interfered with in the same way as the recently discovered chip+pin break. In fact I'm quite surprised they came up with what seems to be a pretty well implemented system, given that they seem to have tried pretty hard to make design mistakes with c+p
Also probably worth a read is some operating system design stuff. I'm not sure how much of it is covered in the suggested books (they're both on my reading list) so it might be redundant, but driver land is full of things like synchronization (semaphores/mutexes/locks etc), memory management issues (depending on the interrupt level you may not be able to access data on other memory pages because you are at a higher level of priority than the VMM), interrupts and interrupt levels etc. etc.
Thinking about it, the books would be remiss to not explain a lot of these things (and also how they are implemented in Linux). For my sins I've done more windows driver development than linux (and the WDF is actually pretty damned smart and well designed, which is a pleasant surprise), so I know more of the Windows context than Linux, but having an understanding of the overall concepts and reasons for the mechanisms of OS Kernels is very useful, and will help you make better design decisions. You can buy a book, or have a look around the web since a lot of universities seem to leave their courses out in the open - some intentionally - for an operating systems design or similar course.
Replying to myself is sad, but I forgot to mention: People have been making card skimmers for ATMs for ages. Just as complicated electronically, more difficult to manufacture since they must be compact, fit with the front of the ATM etc. This attack can be implemented with a laptop and an FPGA kit, both of which can be in a backpack, so is technologically much easier to implement, and since the banks will presume you have given your PIN away and tell you to suck it, much less likely to get you caught.
And if you'd pay any attention you'd notice that the researchers are certain that criminal gangs easily have the technology to do this, given that many are better equipped than these researchers. It's not a whole bunch of hardware, all the parts are readily available, and since the whole of the system is publicly available (intentionally or not) then it's not exactly going to be difficult to implement. This is a fundamental flaw in the design. It's a massive back door into a system that doesn't do what it's supposed to anyway (previous attacks have been somewhat less feasible).
Docx being the microsoft 'open source' format? I'd be surprised if word could render it correctly, given that the spec is several thousand pages of 'if the document is from word 5, and was written under a full moon, then rotate all the bullet points 90 degrees' style specifications.
OpenOffice does the job perfectly well for the vast majority of word processing needs. If you want to use 'proper software' then TeX/LaTeX has been around for quite a while now, and is the tool for any serious document writing effort
I'm with you brother. Look at all the people in the third world who do things naturally (not just childbirth). Those crazy fools don't seem to have any long term problems with disease - some would say they die to fast, but I'm sure it's because they don't have nasty modern vaccines and medicines.
It's not just vaccines that cost more lives than they save man, what about airbags, seatbelts, motorbike helmets, blood transfusions, organ transplants, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and looking where they're going before crossing the road? People die doing those things all the time, we shouldn't let all those people who have done 'research' tell us to use them just because the statistics show that you are much less likely to come to harm with them than without, that's what they want you to think!
Gullible media? I think you give them too much credit. I recall a lot of stories that said that the Wakefield study had been refuted (to put it kindly), but they still managed to mention that there was a possible link between MMR and autism, presumably just to keep fanning the flames. There was a constant call for single jabs, which sounds great, but it was fairly well proven that people missed single jabs, so they weren't as effective.
Personally I'd like to know if the statistics show that a child was more likely to die (or suffer the permanent effects of serious measles) due to single jabs (assuming the percentage that miss jabs, overall immunity in the population etc.) than to 'catch' autism from the MMR jab. Sadly there has been an increase in deaths due to measles (in areas of the UK that have now dropped below the percentage that provides immunity for the non vaccinated).
I tried to get a dell monitor fixed under warranty. Helpfully it has the date of manufacture on the sticker next to the serial code. Unhelpfully the serial code was not recognized by Dell's systems. Cue angry (and fruitless) shouting that I couldn't really care less whether it's on their system, it's a Dell Monitor (says so in big letters on the front and back), and it's in warranty. Fortunately someone else at my work had had the same problem (power button jams) and fixed it before I had to go another round with their customer service.
"no one cares of 2D accel anymore" - yes they do. Try running your desktop (whatever OS) with the 'standard' drivers. Yes that's right, there is a default way of running most graphics cards, probably VESA or something. How else do you think you can install your OS without the correct drivers from the get-go. Likewise, the bios screens etc. all operate through a standard interface (VGA adapter?).
2D Acceleration is probably more important that 3D, it just doesn't get noticed as much. Try dragging/resizing windows without 2D acceleration. Try running a command line program in windows that has a lot of rapidly scrolling text. The un-accelerated drivers are so much slower that the text will scroll slower whilst waiting to be drawn.
2D acceleration is vitally important. And the more people want to watch videos with overlays, resizing, deinterlacing etc. the more 2D is important.
Is there also a false-positive problem here? If they check everyone who complains that it feels like the chemotherapy drug is killing them, then there is a possibility (depending on how the numbers stack up) that they will withdraw treatment from people who actually don't have a problem, thereby killing them. You'd need all the statistics for the rate of incidence of someone reacting badly to the drug, the rate of false positives and negatives for any test for bad reactions to the drug, and a lot of other things. It's very unfortunate, but it may be the case that more lives are saved by telling people to keep on taking the drugs, than would be saved by withdrawing treatment for people because they suspect they have a bad reaction.
I maintain that piracy is what the guy down at the car boot sale with the racks of copied DVDs is committing. He is selling unauthorised copies of copyrighted works. Note 'selling'. Sharing is just that - no-one is getting paid to copy and no-one is paying to listen. One is a criminal enterprise, both are something people have been doing for a very long time.
Compare the following: A - I invite some friends round to my house and we listen to a CD, B - I invite some friends round to my house and make them pay to listen to a CD.
I'm pretty sure B would be illegal, and rightfully so. It's not quite piracy, but it's a similar problem - someone who is not the copyright holder is making a profit from the work. The arguments against file sharing make A unacceptable (I'm not USian, but I thought the NFL and others had tried this already), and that's where they over step the line IMO.
There are a lot of papers out there on anonymous digital cash systems with 'revocable' anonymity. To me this seems to be the ideal solution to the problem. Law abiding Joe Citizen can make payments to Jane Citizen without revealing any personal information to each other or the government (not unlike cash now). However it is possible for a digital 'coin' to be tagged such that the anonymity is revoked.
My understanding is that this is detectable only to the authority that placed the tag, so for example Undercover Officer buys a load of Drugs and Guns and Bombs from A.Terrorist with a tagged coin. The authority can detect it as it is deposited in A.Terrorists account. Then you could conceivably tag every transaction made by A.Terrorist until you've uncovered an entire supply chain for his Drugs and Guns and Bombs, something you can't do as easily with cash at the moment. I might be wrong, but this sounds like an ideal system - protecting the innocent, persecuting the guilty etc.
I concur - GP you're being ripped off! It used to be that the instant transfers (SWIFT or CHAPS) were costly, but if you are willing to wait a few days you could just send money to another account. I tend to do most of my banking online, and you can do it in the same way as you set up a payment for a utility bill. No fees, no hassle, and slowly becoming instantaneous (google it - there's a website that tells you based on your sort code whether your accounts are enabled for instant transfers, it's slowly being rolled out across the country).
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously never had a cable based throttle jam open then. That has never ever happened to anyone...
When we got IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics. Before then the controller was on the motherboard.
It's also an attempt at fuel economy. People are told not to work down through the gears, and instead to brake and change down to the correct gear. If you live somewhere with a lot of roundabouts, then you get all these people coming up to them who are not in a position to accelerate correctly, and hence can't pull out into a suitable size gap. So they come storming up to the roundabout, slam their brakes on at the last second (scaring the shit out of motorcyclists, because every time someone does that I have to assume they haven't seen me and are just going for it), before stopping, changing to first and starting again.
If they were in a position to control the vehicle they could accelerate or decelerate to manoeuvre safely onto the roundabout either ahead or behind existing traffic. Of course that would also mean they have to look slightly earlier than at the last possible moment, but you can't have everything
Also have you ever been in a car with someone who does the official 'shuffle' steering all the bloody time, even when they're making a reasonably sharp turn? The combination of responsive power steering, repeated jerky movements and the fact that they are barely turning fast enough for the manoeuvre they are attempting is not confidence inspiring. Finally a lot of people _do_ drive fast, and I think it would be better if they were slightly more aware of how to control it (for example people who get halfway round a corner, realise they are going faster than they like, and slam the brakes on) and where the limits are (turns out that you will leave the road and end up in a ditch if you push your luck)
I might be getting the physics wrong, but I thought that most performance cars had a 0-60 time that was greater than the 60-0 time, suggesting that the brakes can convert KE to heat quicker than the engine can convert fuel to KE.
I think that some judgement is necessary. The UK police are driven entirely by targets (rather than the interest of the community) which means that they are desperate for arrests. If you are arrested for something then being a reasonable person, 'helping them out', 'making it easier for yourself' etc. (e.g. answering questions or making statements in the absence of legal counsel) is a way of them shoring up their case against you without some pesky lawyer stopping you from incriminating yourself.
Contrast this with people who have regular dealings with the police, and know the system and how to minimise what the police can do to them. In an ideal world some common sense would be used (and apparently was once) and someone who has otherwise been an upstanding member of the community would not have the book thrown at them by the police, whilst someone who was a regular trouble maker would have a more determined effort to seek prosecution made. This is not the case, and if you are cooperative etc. that just means that you are making it easier for them to add a couple of other charges.
Obviously if you have done nothing wrong (as the poster above) then help them out because they know a waste of time when they see it, and they've got those damn targets to meet. But if you have done something, then it really is in your best interests to make sure that you only get prosecuted for what you have actually done, not for what you somehow admitted to when you were helpfully answering questions. It's like the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. One is legal and nigh on encouraged, the other isn't. Like tax, if a prosecution is inevitable, that doesn't mean you're going to go out and look for as much of it as possible does it?
It is a shame that this is the state of affairs, but the police are not around to use common sense these days. I have friends who are police officers, who have been told that 'we've solved enough rape cases this month, we need to catch up on shoplifters'. Because that's what the community they would serve wants - numbers that add up - not for perhaps some violent sexual assailant to be jailed, but for some kids who stole some sweets to be put through the grinder.
So as I understand it - from what I thought was 'if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court' you should make sure that you mention in a police interview anything that you may wish to mention in court. Am I right in presuming that you are entitled to a solicitor during a police interview?
Wikipedia seems to back this up - "Adverse inferences may be drawn in certain circumstances where before or on being charged, the accused fails to mention a specific fact which he later relies upon and which in the circumstances at the time the accused could reasonably be expected to mention. If this failure occurs at an authorised place of detention (e.g. a police station), no inferences can be drawn from any failure occurring before the accused is allowed an opportunity to consult a legal advisor. Section 34 of the 1994 reverses the common law position that such failures could not be relied upon." - so basically there should be no prejudice if you don't answer or state anything until you have a lawyer present, but if you decide to mention it in court having not mentioned it during police questioning then the jury may infer that there was some reason or motive for you not mentioning it earlier
To be fair this seems pretty reasonable. However if I get arrested I will not be answering any questions until a solicitor is present. A friend of mine was arrested, and was treated respectfully by the police, assured that answering questions now would make everything easier later etc. etc. and then when he came to court all his statements are read out by the officers, out of context and with their 'interpretation' of his meaning, needless to say not to his benefit. Hardly seems like the reasonable actions they promised. In the unlikely event that I get arrested I will not be answering anything until I have some legal advice present, since it seems that without such advice the treatment received by someone who does not know the 'system' from the police is somewhat unfair.
I have a lot of respect for the police and the job they do, however it is eroded by behaviour such as this, which attempts to take essentially law abiding and honest people to the cleaners because they don't know how to get away with things unlike the chavs who are in the nick every week and know every trick to make life difficult for the police
You hook a lightbulb up to a solar panel, and it will keep glowing forever. Obviously this has to be done in a completely sealed box so that none of the light escapes, so you are forbidden from checking that the light is still glowing.
Some would say it's useless, but it improves the quality of life of physicists' cats quite dramatically.
We've got something like this in the UK, and I'm sure there are plenty of other places that have them. You can't make a transaction without getting the correct cryptographic response from the card using the card reader. Here's a picture: http://www.nationwide.co.uk/rca/How-does-it-work/find.htm
I don't like the sound of a USB type device, because it seems that there is some possibility it could be interfered with in the same way as the recently discovered chip+pin break. In fact I'm quite surprised they came up with what seems to be a pretty well implemented system, given that they seem to have tried pretty hard to make design mistakes with c+p
Also probably worth a read is some operating system design stuff. I'm not sure how much of it is covered in the suggested books (they're both on my reading list) so it might be redundant, but driver land is full of things like synchronization (semaphores/mutexes/locks etc), memory management issues (depending on the interrupt level you may not be able to access data on other memory pages because you are at a higher level of priority than the VMM), interrupts and interrupt levels etc. etc.
Thinking about it, the books would be remiss to not explain a lot of these things (and also how they are implemented in Linux). For my sins I've done more windows driver development than linux (and the WDF is actually pretty damned smart and well designed, which is a pleasant surprise), so I know more of the Windows context than Linux, but having an understanding of the overall concepts and reasons for the mechanisms of OS Kernels is very useful, and will help you make better design decisions. You can buy a book, or have a look around the web since a lot of universities seem to leave their courses out in the open - some intentionally - for an operating systems design or similar course.
Replying to myself is sad, but I forgot to mention: People have been making card skimmers for ATMs for ages. Just as complicated electronically, more difficult to manufacture since they must be compact, fit with the front of the ATM etc. This attack can be implemented with a laptop and an FPGA kit, both of which can be in a backpack, so is technologically much easier to implement, and since the banks will presume you have given your PIN away and tell you to suck it, much less likely to get you caught.
And if you'd pay any attention you'd notice that the researchers are certain that criminal gangs easily have the technology to do this, given that many are better equipped than these researchers. It's not a whole bunch of hardware, all the parts are readily available, and since the whole of the system is publicly available (intentionally or not) then it's not exactly going to be difficult to implement. This is a fundamental flaw in the design. It's a massive back door into a system that doesn't do what it's supposed to anyway (previous attacks have been somewhat less feasible).
Yeah, and just to really rub it in it jammed off. If it jammed on I would have just left it!
Docx being the microsoft 'open source' format? I'd be surprised if word could render it correctly, given that the spec is several thousand pages of 'if the document is from word 5, and was written under a full moon, then rotate all the bullet points 90 degrees' style specifications.
OpenOffice does the job perfectly well for the vast majority of word processing needs. If you want to use 'proper software' then TeX/LaTeX has been around for quite a while now, and is the tool for any serious document writing effort
I'm with you brother. Look at all the people in the third world who do things naturally (not just childbirth). Those crazy fools don't seem to have any long term problems with disease - some would say they die to fast, but I'm sure it's because they don't have nasty modern vaccines and medicines.
It's not just vaccines that cost more lives than they save man, what about airbags, seatbelts, motorbike helmets, blood transfusions, organ transplants, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and looking where they're going before crossing the road? People die doing those things all the time, we shouldn't let all those people who have done 'research' tell us to use them just because the statistics show that you are much less likely to come to harm with them than without, that's what they want you to think!
Gullible media? I think you give them too much credit. I recall a lot of stories that said that the Wakefield study had been refuted (to put it kindly), but they still managed to mention that there was a possible link between MMR and autism, presumably just to keep fanning the flames. There was a constant call for single jabs, which sounds great, but it was fairly well proven that people missed single jabs, so they weren't as effective.
Personally I'd like to know if the statistics show that a child was more likely to die (or suffer the permanent effects of serious measles) due to single jabs (assuming the percentage that miss jabs, overall immunity in the population etc.) than to 'catch' autism from the MMR jab. Sadly there has been an increase in deaths due to measles (in areas of the UK that have now dropped below the percentage that provides immunity for the non vaccinated).
I tried to get a dell monitor fixed under warranty. Helpfully it has the date of manufacture on the sticker next to the serial code. Unhelpfully the serial code was not recognized by Dell's systems. Cue angry (and fruitless) shouting that I couldn't really care less whether it's on their system, it's a Dell Monitor (says so in big letters on the front and back), and it's in warranty. Fortunately someone else at my work had had the same problem (power button jams) and fixed it before I had to go another round with their customer service.
"no one cares of 2D accel anymore" - yes they do. Try running your desktop (whatever OS) with the 'standard' drivers. Yes that's right, there is a default way of running most graphics cards, probably VESA or something. How else do you think you can install your OS without the correct drivers from the get-go. Likewise, the bios screens etc. all operate through a standard interface (VGA adapter?).
2D Acceleration is probably more important that 3D, it just doesn't get noticed as much. Try dragging/resizing windows without 2D acceleration. Try running a command line program in windows that has a lot of rapidly scrolling text. The un-accelerated drivers are so much slower that the text will scroll slower whilst waiting to be drawn.
2D acceleration is vitally important. And the more people want to watch videos with overlays, resizing, deinterlacing etc. the more 2D is important.
Who is poring over the aluminium while it is being poured?
In Soviet Russia hating Slashdot learnt me to drive so much more...
Is there also a false-positive problem here? If they check everyone who complains that it feels like the chemotherapy drug is killing them, then there is a possibility (depending on how the numbers stack up) that they will withdraw treatment from people who actually don't have a problem, thereby killing them. You'd need all the statistics for the rate of incidence of someone reacting badly to the drug, the rate of false positives and negatives for any test for bad reactions to the drug, and a lot of other things. It's very unfortunate, but it may be the case that more lives are saved by telling people to keep on taking the drugs, than would be saved by withdrawing treatment for people because they suspect they have a bad reaction.
Hasn't this been around forever - I seem to recall you could make a sub-menu on the start-menu for the control panel items using a trick like this.
I maintain that piracy is what the guy down at the car boot sale with the racks of copied DVDs is committing. He is selling unauthorised copies of copyrighted works. Note 'selling'. Sharing is just that - no-one is getting paid to copy and no-one is paying to listen. One is a criminal enterprise, both are something people have been doing for a very long time. Compare the following: A - I invite some friends round to my house and we listen to a CD, B - I invite some friends round to my house and make them pay to listen to a CD. I'm pretty sure B would be illegal, and rightfully so. It's not quite piracy, but it's a similar problem - someone who is not the copyright holder is making a profit from the work. The arguments against file sharing make A unacceptable (I'm not USian, but I thought the NFL and others had tried this already), and that's where they over step the line IMO.
There are a lot of papers out there on anonymous digital cash systems with 'revocable' anonymity. To me this seems to be the ideal solution to the problem. Law abiding Joe Citizen can make payments to Jane Citizen without revealing any personal information to each other or the government (not unlike cash now). However it is possible for a digital 'coin' to be tagged such that the anonymity is revoked.
My understanding is that this is detectable only to the authority that placed the tag, so for example Undercover Officer buys a load of Drugs and Guns and Bombs from A.Terrorist with a tagged coin. The authority can detect it as it is deposited in A.Terrorists account. Then you could conceivably tag every transaction made by A.Terrorist until you've uncovered an entire supply chain for his Drugs and Guns and Bombs, something you can't do as easily with cash at the moment. I might be wrong, but this sounds like an ideal system - protecting the innocent, persecuting the guilty etc.
I concur - GP you're being ripped off! It used to be that the instant transfers (SWIFT or CHAPS) were costly, but if you are willing to wait a few days you could just send money to another account. I tend to do most of my banking online, and you can do it in the same way as you set up a payment for a utility bill. No fees, no hassle, and slowly becoming instantaneous (google it - there's a website that tells you based on your sort code whether your accounts are enabled for instant transfers, it's slowly being rolled out across the country).
I've seen them in mobile phones and LCD panels as well.