The only thing AV provides is a false sense of security. With AV, you're waiting until AFTER an infection occurs and then HOPING the AV company you've chosen has A) seen the malware before, B) bothered to add a signature to their definitions list, and C) is actually capable of removing the virus.
Not quite (although maybe true years ago).
Firstly, unless you have done a VERY poor job of installing it, the AV will scan files BEFORE it will allow them to run, not wait until you've run them and then try to clear up the mess. I think you may be getting mixed up with disinfection tools (which often come bundled with AV). These are used post-infection to clean up, but I haven't encountered anyone who has relied on these alone.
Secondly, nearly EVERY AV product I have seen and used in the past decade (even free ones) has had inbuilt heuristics (they don't always call it this, but it's there). Sure, definitions help it to positively identify KNOWN malware, but with heuristics, as it scans each file, pre-execution, it looks for suspicious behaviours and blocks those programs it thinks are malware-like from running. Of course this will present some false-positives, but then so do definitions.
So whilst it is true that in the old days of non-active AV run on a scheduled / ad-hoc basis your assessment of AV and its limitations was valid, this hasn't been true of any "decent" AV in a (very) long time.
One large financial I used to work for had just such an IVR system in place. It would go through its response tree allegedly (from the customer's point of view) to correctly route the call and provide the call-center agent with all the info they needed to hit thr ground running.
The truth, however, was something of an unfortunate surprise. The surprise wasn't that the agent wasn't provided with the information (I kind of expected that!), but more that the entire response-tree and it's complexity were a psychological move to make the customers think that they were in control of the length of time they were on the phone whilst the whole time the question and answer session was really just there to disguise the high hold times caused by the management being to cheap to recruit enough staff!
Apparently, someone important came up wit the idea that customers would prefer to spend the time answering questions than listening to music.
I think chip and pin was a great idea. Relying on it as perfect security and holding the user responsible for every transaction however was stupid. If Iived in the UK or another chip and pin EU country I would be way too paranoid to ever use my card. Instead of a credit card I'd probably use a debit card and transfer the exact amount needed from another account for every purchase. Thieves can't steal from you if there is nothing to steal.
A great idea, BUT...
Some institutions in the UK allow certain vendors (and there are quite a few of these) a "floor limit" for debit card transactions where, if the value of the transaction is below this threshold the transaction is automatically authorised at point-of-sale even without checking the account's available balance.
This is also the system used for "offline" transactions, where the vendor's card reader has no network access and instead batches the transactions for subsequent communication with the card networks (an example of this would be card transactions made on airliners, cruise ships and trains, although some of these are now in a permanent "online" mode).
In this situation, even if the account is empty, the funds will still be debited, taking the account overdrawn, potentially incurring overdraft interest, perhaps even unplanned overdraft fees (and don't get me started on these!).
Because the transaction in question is chip-and-pin, the bank will (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) take the position that it was the card-holder themselves that made the transaction and therefore hold the card-holder liable not only for the debt, but for the additional charges and interest applied.
I am no expert on such matters, and therefore feel the need to ask:
Is "Safe Passage out of the country" defined in law as being the same as "Unrestricted safe passage out of the country"?
Unless it is worded as such, I can envisage someone interpreting it as being "safe just means without risk to life or limb", rather than "safe means I can't arrest a fugitive" and taking this as an opportunity to nab him en-route to whichever transit hub he makes for.
If there's one truth I've learned in the world if IT, as in pretty much any specialism, "expert" often doesn't mean what you think it means.
Say it out loud and break it into syllables, then define each and you see the true picture:
Expert => ex + spurt
Now, based on my experience, an ex- is a "has been", and a spurt is a "drip under pressure". I wouldn't want either in charge of anything important, let alone the combination of both!
With pointers, I thought the general rule was just to be careful to avoid other peoples' eyes (especially with laser pointers. IIRC this can be seen as assault.)
Not entirely sure the focus on slamming Apple for this was due to their profile... perhaps more for their obscene profit margins being made at the workers' expense. Sure, most of the big names in tech were turning a profit at the expense of the poor down-trodden factory workers, but, on the face of things, none in so blatant a way as Apple.
Another point to consider is that journalists want their stories to strike a chord with their readers, and this is most easily done by making the story personally identifiable to the reader. They had a story about Foxconn. Response of most potential readers - "So what? Who are they?" Now the writer needs to make it identifiable to the reader, so they pull out a list of Foxconn's clients and look for the one most likely to elicit a "Oh, I know who they are... So they push their workers til they make like lemmings, do they?!?" type response, because more readers will identify with the story, and therefore buy more papers. I've worded this for written media, but it could just as easily apply to tv or radio journalists. The choice of Apple from the list of Foxconn's clients was due to the instant recognition the name would trigger. Had they chosen, for example, Acer, most outside the tech arena (unless they had an Acer product themselves) would have responded with "So not only do I not know who Foxconn are, I don't know who Acer is either! Why should I give a damn about companies I've never heard of exploiting workers half a world away?" The Apple brand, on the other hand, has become so pervasive that for many their devices are considered "de rigueur" and thereby their name has permeated society.
I'm not suggesting that there is intent in (the majority of) the media to paint Apple in a bad light, but bad news sells better than good news, but any news sells better if it is personable. If you can take a bad news story and tie it to a pervasive brand, readership goes up.
On the other hand, I could be wrong. Maybe there really is some massive media conspiracy to try to force the great unwashed to perceive different companies in different ways. Until I see concrete evidence, however, I'm prepared to work along the lines of "never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by lazy reporting" (My apologies to Hanlon).
Your post doesn't have to be directly security-related for the business to be placed at risk when you get suckered by social engineering attacks.
That being said, even my comment above was kinda tongue-in-cheek attempt at playing devils' advocate. I'm sad to say that we live in a world where I don't honestly think that any but the tiniest proportion of those businesses requesting FB (or any other, for that matter) passwords would be doing so for the reason I stated.
Fact of the matter is, it's an employers' market at the moment, so unless it is specifically legislated against, employers will use these and any other dirty tricks they like to help narrow down their pool of candidates. Whilst, in an ideal world, anyone who gives such information to a (potential) employer should not be considered for the job for security reasons, my concern is that instead, whether they ultimately use the password or not, the employer will simply hire those that co-operate due to seeing them as being more compliant, lacking the ability to think for themselves and therefore ideal worker-drone material.
18 USC 1030 (a) (2) (c) Whoever— intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains— information from any protected computer; shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.
...may not apply, as the act of handing over your password may be considered by the court to be at the very least a de-facto, possibly even de-jure, grant of authorisation to access the data/system in question. Furthermore, the definition of "computer" in the statute would only protect your pc, it does not appear to be worded in a way that protects your accounts and data held on FB's computers.
Potentially, you could be putting yourself on the hook as conspiring to commit such a breach. Whether the fact that you would be in breach of FB's TOS means that any further access you make to FB's systems is considered "without proper authorisation" or "exceeds authorised access" may be something of a grey area.
I should make clear, however, that IANAL and, furthermore, even if I was, I'm in the UK, so would unlikely be considered an expert in US laws.
I'm thinking (hoping) more of a security/sanity check. i.e. If you're daft enough to give it to them, they'll drop you from the interview list as a high risk to social engineering attacks against them.
The dealer also gets to spend time on out of warranty repairs
Not to mention repairs caused by collisions occurring when the vehicle locks up mid-update. This may save the dealers from having to expend hours (billable to MB) on warranty software updates, but may increase the workload of their body-shops.
On the other hand, they could be sensible about it and have a system whereby updates never happen whilst the ignition is in the on position, updates are downloaded to a separate area of the firmware chip and hashes compared to ensure viability before being made accessible, possibly also with a reference version stored in ROM in case all else fails. If they have any plans to get anything along these lines out the doors without TÜV standing in their way, they'll no doubt be implementing at least one or more of these.
... backlighting is about the most tiring way to illuminate text...
From TFS:
going to have a front-lit display.
Glad to see it's still situation normal around here with few reading TFS, and fewer still TFA. They say the Slashdot effect has mostly disappeared due to advances in server capabilities, but I'm starting to think it's because the percentage of us who actually bother to follow the links is dwindling into insignificance!
Personally, my first solution was laser-mapping of the structure. Then I thought that what was probably more likely was some kind of ridiculously cumbersome database with all such structures incorporated into it to feed into the navigation system alongside mapping data such that that type of route is avoided. In other words, whilst I like the phrase "convertible trailer", I think the boffins at Google should be able to prevent such an occurrence from becoming commonplace.
the limits of the vehicle are often grossly above what the human body can tolerate
This is largely dependant on the thoroughness of maintenance that the vehicle undergoes. If some clueless owner fails to check fluids, tread-depths, etc. the capabilities of the vehicle become significantly diminished.
I would agree, however, that a sizeable number of single-vehicle vs. static object traffic collisions are the cause of what we sometimes used to call "a loose nut behind the wheel", that is to say, a driver whose knowledge of their vehicle's capabilities and/or the effect of road conditions is somewhat lacking. It is not, however, true to say the same about other vehicular collisions. Here, we also need to factor in the driver themselves. Driver distraction, in my experience, tends to be one of the most significant causes, and if you don't bother to keep a proper lookout so that you don't see the kid walking out into the road you're chugging along at 50+, the capabilities of your vehicle and the road conditions have little influence on whether the resultant collision.
Personally, I think it'd be pretty cool if computers could develop the subjectivity needed to respond in a "wow, look at that hot girl"-type fashion. Obviously, this isn't the sort of environment we would want to see it played out, but such subjectivity in other areas could help give artificial constructs far more convincing a "personality" than we currently seem capable of (although if the subjectivity was limited to commenting on hit girls, such a personality, whilst convincing, would be a little too one-dimensional for my liking).
Ahh yes... the good old Quantum Fireball series. Always thought it was a particularly apt name for that series of drive.
One of the jobs I had was at a site with almost exclusively Dell PowerEdge 300 series servers back in the early 2000s, and the ones we had all shipped with FireBalls in the drive carriers. It seemed, at the time, that Dell were only using this series of drive, as whenever we had a failure, the replacement supplied was always from the same series, and rapidly displayed the same symptoms. In our test lab, we stripped the Fireballs from some of the carriers and replaced them with alternative series without getting any discernible failure rate, but due to our contract with Dell (for some reason, the carriers were designated as non-user-serviceable, so swapping the drive in them would have invalidated the warranty and support contract for the whole installation of over 60 servers),not to mention the fact that we would have had to foot the bill for the replacements, we could not carry out such replacements in our production environment.
This, however, was only one of many reasons why we dropped Dell as a supplier. The entire 300 series seemed to develop disturbing issues with RAM and CPU, as well. This coupled with the fact that the on-board component layout for some of the main daughterboards (particularly the one on which the RAM was mounted) was poorly thought out, with key components sited in just the right location that catching them with the airflow guides was practically unavoidable when reassembling the server after replacing yet another failed component (and it wasn't just our on-site staff who found this to be an issue, I personally saw three different Dell techs clip components from the corner of the RAM daughterboard whilst reassembling the server they were working on!).
I think that there is a lot of common ground between our points of view.
Your statement that they are "the only place offering decent standards for free" is one that is shared by many over here. Whilst it is true that the academic standards of such schools is generally higher than in comprehensives sharing the same catchment area, this tends to be as a result of their ability to select the cream of local kids for entry. If they did not have this right to select entrants, and were placed on a level playing field with local comprehensives, then their superior standards would most likely be either indistinguishable from their competitors, or at the very least, the gap would shrink considerably.
My argument, albeit not as well articulated as it could be (could have something to do with the lack of sleep when writing it. Was up for a night-feed of my step-daughter's newborn) is not decrying the standards that grammar schools are capable of achieving, it's more to do with the artificial means by which they arte achieved, and to do with the social by-product of their existence.
As I stated, the intention of the grammar school system is well-meant. Their hearts are in the right place, so to speak. But when you take, as an example, my situation. Out of my group of friends, I went to a grammar school, the rest of the group went to the comprehensive school next door. There was no dedicated school bus system, we all had to share public transport. When you have comprehensive school kids in normal school uniforms with normal school-bags mixing with grammar school kids (far less numerous) forced to wear blazers and carry briefcases, you will end up with social divisions forming where they normally wouldn't. Those of us in the grammar school were encouraged by our peers not to mingle with the thickos from next door, those in the comprehensive were pressured by their peers to avoid contact with the posh kids. Prior to this, most of us had been long-time friends, and most of us lived at least near each other, if not on the same street.
I am all for higher educational standards, particularly when we're in as much of an economic slump as we are. What I am against is having a system whereby the more able kids are separated out of the normal flow of the education system to be educated in a separate, elitist stream. Where kids are setted by ability within the same school, there may be the odd comment of "keener", "geek", "nerd" or "teachers' pet", but that was all it was, just rare comments. I am in favour of creating sets such as this, as it allows for the more academically inclined kids to get the extra stimulation they need to avoid boredom, whilst the less able get the extra support they need to achieve the best grades they can. My reference to it as a necessary "evil", was that it does create, albeit on a much smaller scale, a divide between the kids along the lines of academic ability.
The other main benefit of setting, over separation into different schools, is that it supports kids who are better in some subjects than others.Just because a child is outstanding in their level of comprehension in history, doesn't mean that they are also going to be outstanding in physics or mathematics. Most children are better in some subjects than others, so this system works and supports them, where the grammar/comprehensive divide means that the subject in which they are less able may relegate them to a school where the quality of teaching for their stronger subjects is less pronounced.
Were we in a perfect world, class sizes could be small enough that kid of varying abilities could be in the same class and the teacher still provide this targeted support without separation into sets. With budgets as they are, this is unlikely to be achieved within my lifetime. It is also not helped by the fact that less and less want to go into teaching these days with the bureaucracy in modern schools and the lack of self- (or any form of) discipline exhibited by a sizeable portion of today's you
Glad to see that out of date tech and teaching staff that can't get their heads around how to integrate it into lessons effectively isn't just a UK thing!
I, too, have quite a bit of experience of school computing (albeit on this side of the pond). I've been through it myself, I've worked as the IT support for a fairly large school with a budget large enough that we had an advantage over other schools in the area, and now I'm with my wife, I get exposure to how things (haven't) moved on in the last decade+ as her four daughters have all been through it far more recently than me.
Back when I was in school, we'd just got a "brand new" network put in. Fast Ethernet was not only available at the time, it was commonplace, yet our school opted to throw in a nice new 10-BASE-2 network (remember those). Our exposure to the computers was limited, to say the least. There was no dedicated computing curriculum, the IT department was one (part time) guy, and what little access we had to the computer rooms as kids was hamstrung by the teaching methods.
In mathematics lessons, we were introduced to LOGO. When I say "introduced" to it, I mean we were told exactly what to type to get the pretty pictures with no explanation of syntax, structure, or even what the commands actually did. We were not told how to modify the "programs" we were given to produce results other than those with which the teacher had furnished us, and if any of us figured any of the basics out for ourselves and tried to be creative and get it to do something new, it was seriously frowned upon.
In Science lessons, we were exposed to Excel. Not for formulae, or anything sensible like that,. but because it was the easiest way our teacher knew of to make pretty tables to put the results from our experiments in. We were, again, told where to click and what to type. None of us were given any understanding of just how powerful a spreadsheet could be (let alone that there were non-Microsoft ones available, too.).
In English lessons, we got let loose on Word and Publisher. I say "let loose". What I mean is, we could choose what text we put in, but when it came to anything more than simple typing, we were told what to click and when. No reasons why, no underlying theory, just copying and following instructions.
When it was time to select my A-Levels, I didn't have the option of choosing Computer Science. I had to pick a full complement of classes, then supplement with night classes at a local(ish) college to take my CS A-Level. WOW, were my eyes opened. The lecturers were from the real world, not academia. We covered the how-tos that the school had touched upon, but supplemented it with understanding of what each function was, what it does, why, etc. and also were exposed to the underlying theory. We dabbled in Pascal, but the thing that really had an impact on me, and made me decide that computing was to be my chosen career, was my new-found affinity for relational databases.
Roll the clock on to when I worked for a school and the reasons why the teachers never gave us the understanding to go beyond the simple instructions became almost immediately clear. They'd never been taught computing, either, save for the simple little tasks that they were showing us. For example, our IT department was two people. My boss, who was a mathematics teacher by trade and had never worked in the industry. He taught the Computer Science and ICT curricula, held the purse strings, and had the final word on anything strategic in terms of the network. The other was me, fresh out of school and in my first full-time job. The other teachers all had to bring classes into the computer rooms as well, due to guidelines on percentages of contact time to be spent in school ICT suites. Few of them understood anything about simple off-the-shelf office packages besides the few (very) simple tasks they had had to pick up to survive their time in academia. All but a few of them grumbled about not knowing what to do with the kids once they got them in
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing AV provides is a false sense of security. With AV, you're waiting until AFTER an infection occurs and then HOPING the AV company you've chosen has A) seen the malware before, B) bothered to add a signature to their definitions list, and C) is actually capable of removing the virus.
Not quite (although maybe true years ago).
Firstly, unless you have done a VERY poor job of installing it, the AV will scan files BEFORE it will allow them to run, not wait until you've run them and then try to clear up the mess. I think you may be getting mixed up with disinfection tools (which often come bundled with AV). These are used post-infection to clean up, but I haven't encountered anyone who has relied on these alone.
Secondly, nearly EVERY AV product I have seen and used in the past decade (even free ones) has had inbuilt heuristics (they don't always call it this, but it's there). Sure, definitions help it to positively identify KNOWN malware, but with heuristics, as it scans each file, pre-execution, it looks for suspicious behaviours and blocks those programs it thinks are malware-like from running. Of course this will present some false-positives, but then so do definitions.
So whilst it is true that in the old days of non-active AV run on a scheduled / ad-hoc basis your assessment of AV and its limitations was valid, this hasn't been true of any "decent" AV in a (very) long time.
There is a difference between genuine rounding and poor mathematics.
Simply giving more significant figures is a rounding difference, whereas rounding 16.777 to 16.9 is plain WRONG.
To round to one decimal place would be 16.8!!!
One large financial I used to work for had just such an IVR system in place. It would go through its response tree allegedly (from the customer's point of view) to correctly route the call and provide the call-center agent with all the info they needed to hit thr ground running.
The truth, however, was something of an unfortunate surprise. The surprise wasn't that the agent wasn't provided with the information (I kind of expected that!), but more that the entire response-tree and it's complexity were a psychological move to make the customers think that they were in control of the length of time they were on the phone whilst the whole time the question and answer session was really just there to disguise the high hold times caused by the management being to cheap to recruit enough staff!
Apparently, someone important came up wit the idea that customers would prefer to spend the time answering questions than listening to music.
Pressure and Accelleration are two entirely different types of force, unless you're saying that you can pull a 5G turn underwater. Please try again!
I think chip and pin was a great idea. Relying on it as perfect security and holding the user responsible for every transaction however was stupid. If Iived in the UK or another chip and pin EU country I would be way too paranoid to ever use my card. Instead of a credit card I'd probably use a debit card and transfer the exact amount needed from another account for every purchase. Thieves can't steal from you if there is nothing to steal.
A great idea, BUT...
Some institutions in the UK allow certain vendors (and there are quite a few of these) a "floor limit" for debit card transactions where, if the value of the transaction is below this threshold the transaction is automatically authorised at point-of-sale even without checking the account's available balance.
This is also the system used for "offline" transactions, where the vendor's card reader has no network access and instead batches the transactions for subsequent communication with the card networks (an example of this would be card transactions made on airliners, cruise ships and trains, although some of these are now in a permanent "online" mode).
In this situation, even if the account is empty, the funds will still be debited, taking the account overdrawn, potentially incurring overdraft interest, perhaps even unplanned overdraft fees (and don't get me started on these!).
Because the transaction in question is chip-and-pin, the bank will (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) take the position that it was the card-holder themselves that made the transaction and therefore hold the card-holder liable not only for the debt, but for the additional charges and interest applied.
I am no expert on such matters, and therefore feel the need to ask:
Is "Safe Passage out of the country" defined in law as being the same as "Unrestricted safe passage out of the country"?
Unless it is worded as such, I can envisage someone interpreting it as being "safe just means without risk to life or limb", rather than "safe means I can't arrest a fugitive" and taking this as an opportunity to nab him en-route to whichever transit hub he makes for.
That is SOME laptop, to have a six foot 3 inch screen... just how big is your lap?!?
Or, for real laughs, play the 24fps version at 48 fps and replace all the music with the theme from "Benny Hill"!
If there's one truth I've learned in the world if IT, as in pretty much any specialism, "expert" often doesn't mean what you think it means.
Say it out loud and break it into syllables, then define each and you see the true picture:
Expert => ex + spurt
Now, based on my experience, an ex- is a "has been", and a spurt is a "drip under pressure". I wouldn't want either in charge of anything important, let alone the combination of both!
With pointers, I thought the general rule was just to be careful to avoid other peoples' eyes (especially with laser pointers. IIRC this can be seen as assault.)
As far as bits are concerned, bits of what?
Not entirely sure the focus on slamming Apple for this was due to their profile... perhaps more for their obscene profit margins being made at the workers' expense. Sure, most of the big names in tech were turning a profit at the expense of the poor down-trodden factory workers, but, on the face of things, none in so blatant a way as Apple.
Another point to consider is that journalists want their stories to strike a chord with their readers, and this is most easily done by making the story personally identifiable to the reader. They had a story about Foxconn. Response of most potential readers - "So what? Who are they?" Now the writer needs to make it identifiable to the reader, so they pull out a list of Foxconn's clients and look for the one most likely to elicit a "Oh, I know who they are... So they push their workers til they make like lemmings, do they?!?" type response, because more readers will identify with the story, and therefore buy more papers. I've worded this for written media, but it could just as easily apply to tv or radio journalists. The choice of Apple from the list of Foxconn's clients was due to the instant recognition the name would trigger. Had they chosen, for example, Acer, most outside the tech arena (unless they had an Acer product themselves) would have responded with "So not only do I not know who Foxconn are, I don't know who Acer is either! Why should I give a damn about companies I've never heard of exploiting workers half a world away?" The Apple brand, on the other hand, has become so pervasive that for many their devices are considered "de rigueur" and thereby their name has permeated society.
I'm not suggesting that there is intent in (the majority of) the media to paint Apple in a bad light, but bad news sells better than good news, but any news sells better if it is personable. If you can take a bad news story and tie it to a pervasive brand, readership goes up.
On the other hand, I could be wrong. Maybe there really is some massive media conspiracy to try to force the great unwashed to perceive different companies in different ways. Until I see concrete evidence, however, I'm prepared to work along the lines of "never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by lazy reporting" (My apologies to Hanlon).
...you mean like your spelling "faux pas"?
Your post doesn't have to be directly security-related for the business to be placed at risk when you get suckered by social engineering attacks.
That being said, even my comment above was kinda tongue-in-cheek attempt at playing devils' advocate. I'm sad to say that we live in a world where I don't honestly think that any but the tiniest proportion of those businesses requesting FB (or any other, for that matter) passwords would be doing so for the reason I stated.
Fact of the matter is, it's an employers' market at the moment, so unless it is specifically legislated against, employers will use these and any other dirty tricks they like to help narrow down their pool of candidates. Whilst, in an ideal world, anyone who gives such information to a (potential) employer should not be considered for the job for security reasons, my concern is that instead, whether they ultimately use the password or not, the employer will simply hire those that co-operate due to seeing them as being more compliant, lacking the ability to think for themselves and therefore ideal worker-drone material.
18 USC 1030 (a) (2) (c) Whoever— intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains— information from any protected computer; shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.
Potentially, you could be putting yourself on the hook as conspiring to commit such a breach. Whether the fact that you would be in breach of FB's TOS means that any further access you make to FB's systems is considered "without proper authorisation" or "exceeds authorised access" may be something of a grey area.
I should make clear, however, that IANAL and, furthermore, even if I was, I'm in the UK, so would unlikely be considered an expert in US laws.
I'm thinking (hoping) more of a security/sanity check. i.e. If you're daft enough to give it to them, they'll drop you from the interview list as a high risk to social engineering attacks against them.
The dealer also gets to spend time on out of warranty repairs
Not to mention repairs caused by collisions occurring when the vehicle locks up mid-update. This may save the dealers from having to expend hours (billable to MB) on warranty software updates, but may increase the workload of their body-shops.
On the other hand, they could be sensible about it and have a system whereby updates never happen whilst the ignition is in the on position, updates are downloaded to a separate area of the firmware chip and hashes compared to ensure viability before being made accessible, possibly also with a reference version stored in ROM in case all else fails. If they have any plans to get anything along these lines out the doors without TÜV standing in their way, they'll no doubt be implementing at least one or more of these.
and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.
... backlighting is about the most tiring way to illuminate text...
From TFS:
going to have a front-lit display.
Glad to see it's still situation normal around here with few reading TFS, and fewer still TFA. They say the Slashdot effect has mostly disappeared due to advances in server capabilities, but I'm starting to think it's because the percentage of us who actually bother to follow the links is dwindling into insignificance!
Personally, my first solution was laser-mapping of the structure. Then I thought that what was probably more likely was some kind of ridiculously cumbersome database with all such structures incorporated into it to feed into the navigation system alongside mapping data such that that type of route is avoided. In other words, whilst I like the phrase "convertible trailer", I think the boffins at Google should be able to prevent such an occurrence from becoming commonplace.
the limits of the vehicle are often grossly above what the human body can tolerate
This is largely dependant on the thoroughness of maintenance that the vehicle undergoes. If some clueless owner fails to check fluids, tread-depths, etc. the capabilities of the vehicle become significantly diminished.
I would agree, however, that a sizeable number of single-vehicle vs. static object traffic collisions are the cause of what we sometimes used to call "a loose nut behind the wheel", that is to say, a driver whose knowledge of their vehicle's capabilities and/or the effect of road conditions is somewhat lacking. It is not, however, true to say the same about other vehicular collisions. Here, we also need to factor in the driver themselves. Driver distraction, in my experience, tends to be one of the most significant causes, and if you don't bother to keep a proper lookout so that you don't see the kid walking out into the road you're chugging along at 50+, the capabilities of your vehicle and the road conditions have little influence on whether the resultant collision.
Personally, I think it'd be pretty cool if computers could develop the subjectivity needed to respond in a "wow, look at that hot girl"-type fashion. Obviously, this isn't the sort of environment we would want to see it played out, but such subjectivity in other areas could help give artificial constructs far more convincing a "personality" than we currently seem capable of (although if the subjectivity was limited to commenting on hit girls, such a personality, whilst convincing, would be a little too one-dimensional for my liking).
Ahh yes... the good old Quantum Fireball series. Always thought it was a particularly apt name for that series of drive.
One of the jobs I had was at a site with almost exclusively Dell PowerEdge 300 series servers back in the early 2000s, and the ones we had all shipped with FireBalls in the drive carriers. It seemed, at the time, that Dell were only using this series of drive, as whenever we had a failure, the replacement supplied was always from the same series, and rapidly displayed the same symptoms. In our test lab, we stripped the Fireballs from some of the carriers and replaced them with alternative series without getting any discernible failure rate, but due to our contract with Dell (for some reason, the carriers were designated as non-user-serviceable, so swapping the drive in them would have invalidated the warranty and support contract for the whole installation of over 60 servers),not to mention the fact that we would have had to foot the bill for the replacements, we could not carry out such replacements in our production environment.
This, however, was only one of many reasons why we dropped Dell as a supplier. The entire 300 series seemed to develop disturbing issues with RAM and CPU, as well. This coupled with the fact that the on-board component layout for some of the main daughterboards (particularly the one on which the RAM was mounted) was poorly thought out, with key components sited in just the right location that catching them with the airflow guides was practically unavoidable when reassembling the server after replacing yet another failed component (and it wasn't just our on-site staff who found this to be an issue, I personally saw three different Dell techs clip components from the corner of the RAM daughterboard whilst reassembling the server they were working on!).
original request should not evoke in the target person resentment, anger, or hostility
part of the definition.
Should this proposal become law, resentment and anger would be understandable responses.
I think that there is a lot of common ground between our points of view.
Your statement that they are "the only place offering decent standards for free" is one that is shared by many over here. Whilst it is true that the academic standards of such schools is generally higher than in comprehensives sharing the same catchment area, this tends to be as a result of their ability to select the cream of local kids for entry. If they did not have this right to select entrants, and were placed on a level playing field with local comprehensives, then their superior standards would most likely be either indistinguishable from their competitors, or at the very least, the gap would shrink considerably.
My argument, albeit not as well articulated as it could be (could have something to do with the lack of sleep when writing it. Was up for a night-feed of my step-daughter's newborn) is not decrying the standards that grammar schools are capable of achieving, it's more to do with the artificial means by which they arte achieved, and to do with the social by-product of their existence.
As I stated, the intention of the grammar school system is well-meant. Their hearts are in the right place, so to speak. But when you take, as an example, my situation. Out of my group of friends, I went to a grammar school, the rest of the group went to the comprehensive school next door. There was no dedicated school bus system, we all had to share public transport. When you have comprehensive school kids in normal school uniforms with normal school-bags mixing with grammar school kids (far less numerous) forced to wear blazers and carry briefcases, you will end up with social divisions forming where they normally wouldn't. Those of us in the grammar school were encouraged by our peers not to mingle with the thickos from next door, those in the comprehensive were pressured by their peers to avoid contact with the posh kids. Prior to this, most of us had been long-time friends, and most of us lived at least near each other, if not on the same street.
I am all for higher educational standards, particularly when we're in as much of an economic slump as we are. What I am against is having a system whereby the more able kids are separated out of the normal flow of the education system to be educated in a separate, elitist stream. Where kids are setted by ability within the same school, there may be the odd comment of "keener", "geek", "nerd" or "teachers' pet", but that was all it was, just rare comments. I am in favour of creating sets such as this, as it allows for the more academically inclined kids to get the extra stimulation they need to avoid boredom, whilst the less able get the extra support they need to achieve the best grades they can. My reference to it as a necessary "evil", was that it does create, albeit on a much smaller scale, a divide between the kids along the lines of academic ability.
The other main benefit of setting, over separation into different schools, is that it supports kids who are better in some subjects than others.Just because a child is outstanding in their level of comprehension in history, doesn't mean that they are also going to be outstanding in physics or mathematics. Most children are better in some subjects than others, so this system works and supports them, where the grammar/comprehensive divide means that the subject in which they are less able may relegate them to a school where the quality of teaching for their stronger subjects is less pronounced.
Were we in a perfect world, class sizes could be small enough that kid of varying abilities could be in the same class and the teacher still provide this targeted support without separation into sets. With budgets as they are, this is unlikely to be achieved within my lifetime. It is also not helped by the fact that less and less want to go into teaching these days with the bureaucracy in modern schools and the lack of self- (or any form of) discipline exhibited by a sizeable portion of today's you
Glad to see that out of date tech and teaching staff that can't get their heads around how to integrate it into lessons effectively isn't just a UK thing!
I, too, have quite a bit of experience of school computing (albeit on this side of the pond). I've been through it myself, I've worked as the IT support for a fairly large school with a budget large enough that we had an advantage over other schools in the area, and now I'm with my wife, I get exposure to how things (haven't) moved on in the last decade+ as her four daughters have all been through it far more recently than me.
Back when I was in school, we'd just got a "brand new" network put in. Fast Ethernet was not only available at the time, it was commonplace, yet our school opted to throw in a nice new 10-BASE-2 network (remember those). Our exposure to the computers was limited, to say the least. There was no dedicated computing curriculum, the IT department was one (part time) guy, and what little access we had to the computer rooms as kids was hamstrung by the teaching methods.
In mathematics lessons, we were introduced to LOGO. When I say "introduced" to it, I mean we were told exactly what to type to get the pretty pictures with no explanation of syntax, structure, or even what the commands actually did. We were not told how to modify the "programs" we were given to produce results other than those with which the teacher had furnished us, and if any of us figured any of the basics out for ourselves and tried to be creative and get it to do something new, it was seriously frowned upon.
In Science lessons, we were exposed to Excel. Not for formulae, or anything sensible like that,. but because it was the easiest way our teacher knew of to make pretty tables to put the results from our experiments in. We were, again, told where to click and what to type. None of us were given any understanding of just how powerful a spreadsheet could be (let alone that there were non-Microsoft ones available, too.).
In English lessons, we got let loose on Word and Publisher. I say "let loose". What I mean is, we could choose what text we put in, but when it came to anything more than simple typing, we were told what to click and when. No reasons why, no underlying theory, just copying and following instructions.
When it was time to select my A-Levels, I didn't have the option of choosing Computer Science. I had to pick a full complement of classes, then supplement with night classes at a local(ish) college to take my CS A-Level. WOW, were my eyes opened. The lecturers were from the real world, not academia. We covered the how-tos that the school had touched upon, but supplemented it with understanding of what each function was, what it does, why, etc. and also were exposed to the underlying theory. We dabbled in Pascal, but the thing that really had an impact on me, and made me decide that computing was to be my chosen career, was my new-found affinity for relational databases.
Roll the clock on to when I worked for a school and the reasons why the teachers never gave us the understanding to go beyond the simple instructions became almost immediately clear. They'd never been taught computing, either, save for the simple little tasks that they were showing us. For example, our IT department was two people. My boss, who was a mathematics teacher by trade and had never worked in the industry. He taught the Computer Science and ICT curricula, held the purse strings, and had the final word on anything strategic in terms of the network. The other was me, fresh out of school and in my first full-time job. The other teachers all had to bring classes into the computer rooms as well, due to guidelines on percentages of contact time to be spent in school ICT suites. Few of them understood anything about simple off-the-shelf office packages besides the few (very) simple tasks they had had to pick up to survive their time in academia. All but a few of them grumbled about not knowing what to do with the kids once they got them in