You will get better performance on a laptop from a PC card adaptor. Once again, your choice of Canon and CF has done you well. Like CF in general, PC cards for CF are also cheaper than SD equivalents. I've got them both and I'm still happier with CF performance.
At the same time, the folding design is interesting. Cool stuff scandisk.
The scandisk SD to PC card adaptor I have works well enough, but I've had problems fdisking a 512 SD card. It worked but it hurt. Cfdisk could not deal with it so I had to use regular fdisk to set up a ext2 partition, which I then was able to format and mount without a problem. At the same time, I've never had similar problems with CF.
My Windows Server 2003 desktop... is perfectly stable.
Know anything about 64bit M$, other than Alpha? Tell me what you mean by stable when you talk about a system that has a four minute half life when attached to a network. How would you compare the UI to modern multidesktop environments such as KDE or Gnome? Why on Earth would I want to cripple a nice 64 bit computer with Windoze?
What you say has been said of every Microsoft Windows. The new one is always better than the old one, they say but the quality never changes. Expectations are so low that Steve Balmer can promise "insane" uptimes of 30 days with a straight face.
I've never seen the difference from one Windoze to another. Windows 2000 pro, which is still reputed to be more stable than XP home or pro, never lasted more than 3 days for me. That's despite excellent support by in house staff at both a fortune 500 company and at a computer wholesaler. XP is just as buggy as Windows 3.1 was and does not do a whole lot more.
Free software does everything Microsoft can and does it better.
a frind of mine would say that if you need more then a ascii text editor and a graphics app to make a webpage then your in deep trouble.
That's true because the big automated page makers create a rat's nest.
The article was on the Troll side for missing most of the improvements in current free software and many excellent alternatives to the programs discussed. For fast and friendly web development, Bluefish and Quanta are hard to beat. I've never used the mentioned Nvu, but it did not look very impressive. Most of the author's slams of GIMP are dated or silly. The GIMP interface is no harder to use than any other complex piece of software and compares favorably to commercial programs. The problem of CMYK color selection has been addressed and we can be sure that free tools will be able to perform the common tasks of color matching from screen to printer if your eyeballs can't. Of course, if you don't have a good eye you might consider your choice of graphics as a career. All in all, the author is either behind or dishonest.
There are very few things I want to do that I can't get done with free software that's just as good as non free stuff.
My Windows Server 2003 desktop... is perfectly stable.
That has been said of every Microsoft Windows. The new one is always better than the old one, they say but the quality never changes. Expectations are so low that Steve Balmer can promise "insane" uptimes of 30 days with a straight face.
I've never seen the difference from one Windoze to another. Windows 2000 pro, which is still reputed to be more stable than XP home or pro, never lasted more than 3 days for me. That's despite excellent support by in house staff at both a fortune 500 company and at a computer wholesaler. XP is just as buggy as Windows 3.1 was and does not do a whole lot more.
Free software does everything Microsoft can and does it better.
I'd recommend revising your use of the "monoculture" term given the latest trojan attack on RedHat users and the PHP/Apache/Google worm making the rounds.
In my other life I do tech for a local community theatre group.
I do a free software demo once a month. I've had problems, but nothing like a BSoD. My machines, like all the other demos at CES, stay up even if pieces fail.
It sounds to me like the Microsofties did fine.
I'm not sure how you can say that. Gates was obviously pissed and did not play well with other's who tried to help him. It was a classic display of lack of cool. The aftermath is this pathetic spin piece that could be summarized in two sentences but was not. The guy is falling on his sword and trying to blame hardware for what was obviously buggy and graceless software. A poor performance followed by a lie, how sorry can you get?
Let me clearly distinguish the differences between your world and a technical demonstration.
People go to the theater to be entertained. You are supposed to suspend your disbelief. When some gadget does not work, people are entertained anyway. In fact, it can be more fun that way. No one reasonable feels cheated.
People go to a tech demo to see what you have. When what you have fails, you've seen all you need to know. You might feel cheated if you let someone blow smoke on you and you then go buy the buggy junk because you think it's not really broken. On the rare occasion something does not work at one of my demo's, I tell my audience right there and then. I don't try to hide the problems or blame shift or charge people money for something afterward.
The whole thing is just Microsoft. They made something so buggy they could not even demo it this time. They hyped it before hand and they will continue to hype it. The spin is best characterized by the phrase that was repeated in the article:
... the team pulled it out despite some obstacles... how they kept things moving...
I don't want to have that kind of problem with something I pay for that supposed to just work. Microsoft is supposed to make things easy, but they don't.
There are many major differences between that and the M$ crack. The most important being:
The FSF did not hide anything. There were too many independent parties involved for them to be able to lie about any detail. M$ can say whatever M$ wants.
A local user was involved with the FSF crack. I doubt there was any relation at all with M$ from the people who cracked M$, in other words anyone could have done it.
The FSF ftp site was a repository that could easily be checked by the original developers and from previous GPG signed files and their MD5 sums. Microsoft's site was their holy of holies and I doubt anyone else had coppies that were not compromised or that could be compared as easily, but we will never really know by difference 1.
Please don't try to compare the Microsoft monoculture disaster to free software. You can't.
*awaits justifications and explanations of why this is nothing like Microsoft*
While I can't justify the difference, I'll tell you that there is one if we don't see any regularly recurring network born auto-root that's so bad it threatens the top level domain servers. It's not like someone cracked kernel.org and owned it for three months injecting whatever they pleased into the codebase. One good explanation of the difference is that Marketing dorks who do little more than buy other's code can't maintain it properly.
I think you have missed my point: The law is unnecessarily complicated. They could have based it on easily measured power from an ideal calculation of maximum broadcast efficiency. The other way is stupid and creates all sorts of uncertainty.
Most station license applications base their results on these kind of calculation instead of extensive field measurements (or at least they did 20 years ago when I worked at a community radio station.)
Fantastic, I can ask people who hate community based radio how to remain legal!
it's not too hard to calculate the field strength based on the transmitted power, coax cable, and antenna properties.
All the calculations in the world will do no good if the FCC decides to give you trouble and they walk in with a measuring device that says something bad. You are screwed the same way if you measured wrong.
This has been done before. When ham radio operators figured a way to deliver moving pictures, the TV industry changed the law to make it impossible. The effort was transparent then and it's transparent now. The federal government has been used again to shut down a potential competitor, regardless of how small a real competitive threat is represented.
This time, however, it's not going to work. People have discovered just how poorly the music industry has served them and they are not going to go back. Radio and recording as they existed 60 years ago are both dead.
The download dialog box is trivial for all the reasons you mentioned and one more, wget. Wget is a better utility for downloading than most dialogs. Anyone who's not sure about what they are going to get can and should copy the link location and then paste it into a terminal. If you are really paranoid, you can download as a different user or even to another computer. You will clearly see the name of the file on the command line and you can then launch the downloaded file and watch for error messages. One of the primary strengths of free software is always having another option.
The discouraging thing about the exploit is that it's going to get the average user, regardless of what browser they use. The average user is going to be confronted by a bank or other institution that insists on huge names and downloads. They soon get used to ignoring the link names and will be caught regardless of which browser they use. The flaw in IE, which allowed falsification of the hover and status bar was worse and could catch even wary users, if there were any wary users that trusted Windows left.
That's only half right, because you don't have to let Bill take away. KDE3 runs well on a 233MHz PII and 64MB of RAM, almost a whole order of magnitude less of hardware than it takes to make XP happy. The picture is more drastic when you consider the virus load most XP setups must endure. You need a 2GHz processor just to keep running while your computer serves out spam and kiddie porn.
The changes Dr. Dobbs so wants are already happening in free software. There's a reason things like Arts can play music, games and system noises all at the same time while software on M$ has trouble sharing sound devices. If Beowulf is not a 10 year head start on concurrency, I don't know what is.
Quoth SVDave:
I don't predict good things for Microsoft. Longhorn in 2007, anyone?
Perhaps old Billy should put his money into processor development instead of SCO and FUD.
Real nice of them to change the regs from something that can be measured in the transmitter to something that needs an external instrument. Let me guess that calibration of such an instrument to 250uv/meter takes a standards lab and that common atmospheric condition variations change the reading by a factor of two.
It just can't be easy, can it?
How much longer do we have to put up with legal stupidity based on obsolete technology? The sooner traditional broadcasters and all the other copyright warriors go out of business, the better. Between frequency hopping and the ease of publishing, these people have no further reason to exist. Anyone can make high quality recordings now and everyone should be allowed to self publish. There is no longer a scarcity of broadcast frequencies.
The law should reflect that fact instead of getting tighter and encouraging more people to invest in obsolete equipment. Like dinosaur bones, FM radios belong in museums.
if lots of people in the same block start using this?... it will be nigh-on impossible to listen to the radio without interference.
It's hard to broadcast over a "real" commercial crap station. These things are pretty clean and people set them to empty space. Most people won't have the ability to build an antenna that gets out of their house, even in empty space, so you don't have much to worry about.
Where I live, there's no problem at all. There are ten houses on my block and many more free spots on the dial than that. I doubt more than one of those houses will ever want one of these devices.
My wife mentioned apartments as a likely radio congestion zone, but I don't think so. Most apartments only have one stereo, which eliminates half the need for the device in the first place. I want one in my house so that the boom box in the kitchen and the stereo in the living room play the same thing at a low volume. In most apartments, the boom box in the kitchen fills every nook and cranny of about four living spaces, producing a more realistic problem than your tuning worry.
People like you love to put up the fact that Microsoft was convicted of being a monopoly by the government every time it suits you (or you run out of arguments) and then you turn around and claim that the thing that holds up the monopoly is the government. Way great logic.
Why not? Both things are proved by published documents from a trusted source. Nasty details of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior were published in the finding of facts. You can go and read sworn testimony by tech industry leaders. Public spending and laws are also published. It's not my fault my government can document abuse and encourage it at the same time.
We're not communists, we're "software terrorists",
He already tried that but it backfired. M$ tried to blame windoze viruses and worms on FOSS. It was easy to show that the worms were written on Windoze by people who know about Windoze. All the accusation did was admit that there was a worm problem and give a good example of blame shifting. It also highlighted the relative security of free software.
Concentrated efforts by real Communists against free software have failed. No automated worms have emerged, despite the majority use of free software in typical targets of such efforts: high profile corporate webserves.
Microsoft themselves have engaged in such activities against previous competitive threats. There are court documented cases of them breaking code for DrDOS, Netscape and a host of others. It would be interesting indeed if they were to try to classify such activity as "terrorist".
If there is a software terrorist threat, it's dependence on Windows. Windows systems, including large banks, have continued to be trashed and this has an effect on public moral and institutional confidence.
Microsoft is a state sponsored monopoly, directly and indirectly. They are dependent on the false concept of "IP", something that is entirely government created. They also depend on generous government spending.
The only sensible thing that can be said about "IP" is that it's a government granted exclusive franchise or monopoly. Copyrights, patents and trademark have about as much in common with each other as they do with the local electric utility. The most natural American thought is to limit all forms of exclusive franchises. This includes "IP" franchises.
It never ceases to amaze me that local, state and federal governments continue to purchase Microsoft. There are many alternatives that cost less and have fewer problems available.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft would be in a tail spin right now if it were not for billions of dollars in government spending. Does anyone think they would have been able to make their "numbers" had the DoD not stepped up to the plate with ridiculous decade long exclusive purchases of software that has yet to be written? I think not and such purchases of inferior goods are the surest sign of state support.
The market, however, is not to be conned. There's only so much impact the government can have. When the limit hits, they will sink without a trace. It will not be a big deal either.
The author of your link is amazed by what he finds on line and says:
Apparently, there is a Windows error screen photo-taking subculture
If by subculture he means that there are BSoD everywhere and that many people have the same thought, "I can't believe they are using Windoze for that, let me take a picture.", then sure, that's a subculture. I think it's a normal thought by people who are reasonably observant.
Google Images Score 902 of them. High on the list is this one from Delta. Now why would anyone have blamed M$ for Delta and Comair's Christmas cheer? I used to think these things were image manipulations, till I saw them live myself. Poor Bill Gates wishes his latest was a bad dream.
... proof that the Microsoft PR department astroturfs/.
That job was offshored about a decade ago! Why pay for the poor English and Math skills of a US minimum wage worker when you can have 10 PhDs who would otherwise be driving a taxi?
Consider the portion of the "occupied" by an aircraft at the altitudes involved here. Now calculate the chance of hitting it with a "random." beam.... compare those odds to being struck by lightning
Lightning strikes happen all the time but let's not confuse the issue.
It might have taken a deliberate effort to cause the first event. That's not what was chased, however.
The chances of being hit by a random beam when you are flying a helicopter looking for beams over a heavily populated area might be better than you think. If the helicopter follows the first flash, the odds only get better. They might be as good as your chances of chasing actual gunfire. Where my mom used to live, you could hear the shots all night long.
We shall see what happened later. There's a chance this man did what's reported. There's also a chance he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and all of us are going to be slapped and denied the ability to own a usefull and mostly harmless tool. We don't have any dwell times or expert opinions of it. Right now, all we know is the defendants name, face and that the FBI had an axe to grind.
The government is right here, it is no joke when there are people in that plane. Can you imagine shining your laser at a landing plane and watching it crash?
No, I can't imagine that. First, it's never, ever happened. Second, I doubt it's possible. Third, I'm never going to do such a stupid thing. I can imagine something else though.
Can you imagine being arrested for demonstrating a laser pointer to your daughter? You know, you're outside pointing at trees and clouds when a hoard of squad cars pulls up, hauls you away and reporters write up an incriminating story about it which is published with your picture in the USA Today. All of it done so that they can prove a point to pranksters? If we presume this man's innocence, that's exactly what happened to him.
Sounds awful to me.
What good is this going to do? How many "pranksters" are going to get the message being made by arresting this man? I presume the average "prankster" is a 14 year old boy with a toy and no clue. The chances, five years down the line, of that 14 year old even knowing what he's doing is against the law are remote to none. A warning on the pointer will do more than this arrest, even though such a warning will be lost with in all the other stupid warnings, which by their pointlessness we are training people to ignore.
what are you saying? that the feds shouldn't prosecute this guy for interfering with a flight crew and/or reckless endangerment? please clarify.
It looks like what he's saying is that this was an arrest for show that has little to do with fighting terrorism and much to do with making the FBI look good. We have the FBI themselves admitting that they do not think any of the suspects are terrorists, but simply think they are pranksters. I'd like to see them even prove the pranksters are guilty, and I doubt they care. What they did was fly around long enough to see a green flash, then they broke down doors.
It's possible, and we should presume, them man is innocent. He could have been doing just what he said he was doing, demonstrating a laser pointer to his daughter by pointing it at trees and sky. I doubt very much that he intended to blind air crew.
To prove guilt to me you would have to have recordings of green light from the same location for a long duration and from multiple locations. Anything else to me is an accident.
It would be reprehensible for the FBI to make a splash like this, and they will prosecute all the harder to avoid the embarrassment of losing.
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time, the folding design is interesting. Cool stuff scandisk.
The scandisk SD to PC card adaptor I have works well enough, but I've had problems fdisking a 512 SD card. It worked but it hurt. Cfdisk could not deal with it so I had to use regular fdisk to set up a ext2 partition, which I then was able to format and mount without a problem. At the same time, I've never had similar problems with CF.
Know anything about 64bit M$, other than Alpha? Tell me what you mean by stable when you talk about a system that has a four minute half life when attached to a network. How would you compare the UI to modern multidesktop environments such as KDE or Gnome? Why on Earth would I want to cripple a nice 64 bit computer with Windoze?
What you say has been said of every Microsoft Windows. The new one is always better than the old one, they say but the quality never changes. Expectations are so low that Steve Balmer can promise "insane" uptimes of 30 days with a straight face.
I've never seen the difference from one Windoze to another. Windows 2000 pro, which is still reputed to be more stable than XP home or pro, never lasted more than 3 days for me. That's despite excellent support by in house staff at both a fortune 500 company and at a computer wholesaler. XP is just as buggy as Windows 3.1 was and does not do a whole lot more.
Free software does everything Microsoft can and does it better.
That's true because the big automated page makers create a rat's nest.
The article was on the Troll side for missing most of the improvements in current free software and many excellent alternatives to the programs discussed. For fast and friendly web development, Bluefish and Quanta are hard to beat. I've never used the mentioned Nvu, but it did not look very impressive. Most of the author's slams of GIMP are dated or silly. The GIMP interface is no harder to use than any other complex piece of software and compares favorably to commercial programs. The problem of CMYK color selection has been addressed and we can be sure that free tools will be able to perform the common tasks of color matching from screen to printer if your eyeballs can't. Of course, if you don't have a good eye you might consider your choice of graphics as a career. All in all, the author is either behind or dishonest.
There are very few things I want to do that I can't get done with free software that's just as good as non free stuff.
That has been said of every Microsoft Windows. The new one is always better than the old one, they say but the quality never changes. Expectations are so low that Steve Balmer can promise "insane" uptimes of 30 days with a straight face.
I've never seen the difference from one Windoze to another. Windows 2000 pro, which is still reputed to be more stable than XP home or pro, never lasted more than 3 days for me. That's despite excellent support by in house staff at both a fortune 500 company and at a computer wholesaler. XP is just as buggy as Windows 3.1 was and does not do a whole lot more.
Free software does everything Microsoft can and does it better.
As a Debian and boa user, I could care less.
It was rigged, it just did not work.
They should have used a full screen movie on a Mac.
I do a free software demo once a month. I've had problems, but nothing like a BSoD. My machines, like all the other demos at CES, stay up even if pieces fail.
It sounds to me like the Microsofties did fine.
I'm not sure how you can say that. Gates was obviously pissed and did not play well with other's who tried to help him. It was a classic display of lack of cool. The aftermath is this pathetic spin piece that could be summarized in two sentences but was not. The guy is falling on his sword and trying to blame hardware for what was obviously buggy and graceless software. A poor performance followed by a lie, how sorry can you get?
Let me clearly distinguish the differences between your world and a technical demonstration.
People go to the theater to be entertained. You are supposed to suspend your disbelief. When some gadget does not work, people are entertained anyway. In fact, it can be more fun that way. No one reasonable feels cheated.
People go to a tech demo to see what you have. When what you have fails, you've seen all you need to know. You might feel cheated if you let someone blow smoke on you and you then go buy the buggy junk because you think it's not really broken. On the rare occasion something does not work at one of my demo's, I tell my audience right there and then. I don't try to hide the problems or blame shift or charge people money for something afterward.
The whole thing is just Microsoft. They made something so buggy they could not even demo it this time. They hyped it before hand and they will continue to hype it. The spin is best characterized by the phrase that was repeated in the article:
I don't want to have that kind of problem with something I pay for that supposed to just work. Microsoft is supposed to make things easy, but they don't.
There are many major differences between that and the M$ crack. The most important being:
Please don't try to compare the Microsoft monoculture disaster to free software. You can't.
While I can't justify the difference, I'll tell you that there is one if we don't see any regularly recurring network born auto-root that's so bad it threatens the top level domain servers. It's not like someone cracked kernel.org and owned it for three months injecting whatever they pleased into the codebase. One good explanation of the difference is that Marketing dorks who do little more than buy other's code can't maintain it properly.
Most station license applications base their results on these kind of calculation instead of extensive field measurements (or at least they did 20 years ago when I worked at a community radio station.)
Fantastic, I can ask people who hate community based radio how to remain legal!
it's not too hard to calculate the field strength based on the transmitted power, coax cable, and antenna properties.
All the calculations in the world will do no good if the FCC decides to give you trouble and they walk in with a measuring device that says something bad. You are screwed the same way if you measured wrong.
This has been done before. When ham radio operators figured a way to deliver moving pictures, the TV industry changed the law to make it impossible. The effort was transparent then and it's transparent now. The federal government has been used again to shut down a potential competitor, regardless of how small a real competitive threat is represented.
This time, however, it's not going to work. People have discovered just how poorly the music industry has served them and they are not going to go back. Radio and recording as they existed 60 years ago are both dead.
The download dialog box is trivial for all the reasons you mentioned and one more, wget. Wget is a better utility for downloading than most dialogs. Anyone who's not sure about what they are going to get can and should copy the link location and then paste it into a terminal. If you are really paranoid, you can download as a different user or even to another computer. You will clearly see the name of the file on the command line and you can then launch the downloaded file and watch for error messages. One of the primary strengths of free software is always having another option.
The discouraging thing about the exploit is that it's going to get the average user, regardless of what browser they use. The average user is going to be confronted by a bank or other institution that insists on huge names and downloads. They soon get used to ignoring the link names and will be caught regardless of which browser they use. The flaw in IE, which allowed falsification of the hover and status bar was worse and could catch even wary users, if there were any wary users that trusted Windows left.
?Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away.?
That's only half right, because you don't have to let Bill take away. KDE3 runs well on a 233MHz PII and 64MB of RAM, almost a whole order of magnitude less of hardware than it takes to make XP happy. The picture is more drastic when you consider the virus load most XP setups must endure. You need a 2GHz processor just to keep running while your computer serves out spam and kiddie porn.
The changes Dr. Dobbs so wants are already happening in free software. There's a reason things like Arts can play music, games and system noises all at the same time while software on M$ has trouble sharing sound devices. If Beowulf is not a 10 year head start on concurrency, I don't know what is.
Quoth SVDave:
I don't predict good things for Microsoft. Longhorn in 2007, anyone?
Perhaps old Billy should put his money into processor development instead of SCO and FUD.
It just can't be easy, can it?
How much longer do we have to put up with legal stupidity based on obsolete technology? The sooner traditional broadcasters and all the other copyright warriors go out of business, the better. Between frequency hopping and the ease of publishing, these people have no further reason to exist. Anyone can make high quality recordings now and everyone should be allowed to self publish. There is no longer a scarcity of broadcast frequencies.
The law should reflect that fact instead of getting tighter and encouraging more people to invest in obsolete equipment. Like dinosaur bones, FM radios belong in museums.
It's hard to broadcast over a "real" commercial crap station. These things are pretty clean and people set them to empty space. Most people won't have the ability to build an antenna that gets out of their house, even in empty space, so you don't have much to worry about.
Where I live, there's no problem at all. There are ten houses on my block and many more free spots on the dial than that. I doubt more than one of those houses will ever want one of these devices.
My wife mentioned apartments as a likely radio congestion zone, but I don't think so. Most apartments only have one stereo, which eliminates half the need for the device in the first place. I want one in my house so that the boom box in the kitchen and the stereo in the living room play the same thing at a low volume. In most apartments, the boom box in the kitchen fills every nook and cranny of about four living spaces, producing a more realistic problem than your tuning worry.
Dude, not even WinME supports WinME.
You can say that about anything Microsoft. So we must conclude, dude, that not even M$ supports M$. Good money after bad, I say.
Looks like you answered the question "no". Thanks for playing.
People like you love to put up the fact that Microsoft was convicted of being a monopoly by the government every time it suits you (or you run out of arguments) and then you turn around and claim that the thing that holds up the monopoly is the government. Way great logic.
Why not? Both things are proved by published documents from a trusted source. Nasty details of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior were published in the finding of facts. You can go and read sworn testimony by tech industry leaders. Public spending and laws are also published. It's not my fault my government can document abuse and encourage it at the same time.
He already tried that but it backfired. M$ tried to blame windoze viruses and worms on FOSS. It was easy to show that the worms were written on Windoze by people who know about Windoze. All the accusation did was admit that there was a worm problem and give a good example of blame shifting. It also highlighted the relative security of free software.
Concentrated efforts by real Communists against free software have failed. No automated worms have emerged, despite the majority use of free software in typical targets of such efforts: high profile corporate webserves.
Microsoft themselves have engaged in such activities against previous competitive threats. There are court documented cases of them breaking code for DrDOS, Netscape and a host of others. It would be interesting indeed if they were to try to classify such activity as "terrorist".
If there is a software terrorist threat, it's dependence on Windows. Windows systems, including large banks, have continued to be trashed and this has an effect on public moral and institutional confidence.
Mojo, free software's got it, M$ don't.
The only sensible thing that can be said about "IP" is that it's a government granted exclusive franchise or monopoly. Copyrights, patents and trademark have about as much in common with each other as they do with the local electric utility. The most natural American thought is to limit all forms of exclusive franchises. This includes "IP" franchises.
It never ceases to amaze me that local, state and federal governments continue to purchase Microsoft. There are many alternatives that cost less and have fewer problems available.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft would be in a tail spin right now if it were not for billions of dollars in government spending. Does anyone think they would have been able to make their "numbers" had the DoD not stepped up to the plate with ridiculous decade long exclusive purchases of software that has yet to be written? I think not and such purchases of inferior goods are the surest sign of state support.
The market, however, is not to be conned. There's only so much impact the government can have. When the limit hits, they will sink without a trace. It will not be a big deal either.
Apparently, there is a Windows error screen photo-taking subculture
If by subculture he means that there are BSoD everywhere and that many people have the same thought, "I can't believe they are using Windoze for that, let me take a picture.", then sure, that's a subculture. I think it's a normal thought by people who are reasonably observant.
Google Images Score 902 of them. High on the list is this one from Delta. Now why would anyone have blamed M$ for Delta and Comair's Christmas cheer? I used to think these things were image manipulations, till I saw them live myself. Poor Bill Gates wishes his latest was a bad dream.
That job was offshored about a decade ago! Why pay for the poor English and Math skills of a US minimum wage worker when you can have 10 PhDs who would otherwise be driving a taxi?
Just look how well it works for their code base!
And 250 W of space heater for something close to an order of magnitude less than that.
Lightning strikes happen all the time but let's not confuse the issue.
It might have taken a deliberate effort to cause the first event. That's not what was chased, however.
The chances of being hit by a random beam when you are flying a helicopter looking for beams over a heavily populated area might be better than you think. If the helicopter follows the first flash, the odds only get better. They might be as good as your chances of chasing actual gunfire. Where my mom used to live, you could hear the shots all night long.
We shall see what happened later. There's a chance this man did what's reported. There's also a chance he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and all of us are going to be slapped and denied the ability to own a usefull and mostly harmless tool. We don't have any dwell times or expert opinions of it. Right now, all we know is the defendants name, face and that the FBI had an axe to grind.
No, I can't imagine that. First, it's never, ever happened. Second, I doubt it's possible. Third, I'm never going to do such a stupid thing. I can imagine something else though.
Can you imagine being arrested for demonstrating a laser pointer to your daughter? You know, you're outside pointing at trees and clouds when a hoard of squad cars pulls up, hauls you away and reporters write up an incriminating story about it which is published with your picture in the USA Today. All of it done so that they can prove a point to pranksters? If we presume this man's innocence, that's exactly what happened to him.
Sounds awful to me.
What good is this going to do? How many "pranksters" are going to get the message being made by arresting this man? I presume the average "prankster" is a 14 year old boy with a toy and no clue. The chances, five years down the line, of that 14 year old even knowing what he's doing is against the law are remote to none. A warning on the pointer will do more than this arrest, even though such a warning will be lost with in all the other stupid warnings, which by their pointlessness we are training people to ignore.
It looks like what he's saying is that this was an arrest for show that has little to do with fighting terrorism and much to do with making the FBI look good. We have the FBI themselves admitting that they do not think any of the suspects are terrorists, but simply think they are pranksters. I'd like to see them even prove the pranksters are guilty, and I doubt they care. What they did was fly around long enough to see a green flash, then they broke down doors.
It's possible, and we should presume, them man is innocent. He could have been doing just what he said he was doing, demonstrating a laser pointer to his daughter by pointing it at trees and sky. I doubt very much that he intended to blind air crew.
To prove guilt to me you would have to have recordings of green light from the same location for a long duration and from multiple locations. Anything else to me is an accident.
It would be reprehensible for the FBI to make a splash like this, and they will prosecute all the harder to avoid the embarrassment of losing.