What does "[c]ontent blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising)" mean? Most users *want* to block specific types of content, namely advertising (particularly obtrusive, bandwidth-heavy ads). People don't want to block something just because it's bandwidth-heavy, otherwise they'd be blocking videos and such that they do want to watch.
And how's this going to play with Firefox's mandatory extension signing that's scheduled to take effect with FF43? Will they refuse to sign extensions that don't follow these guidelines, thereby going beyond a model of simply ensuring that the extension isn't harmful? Will they get around that by defining extensions that don't follow these guidelines as "harmful", even if they're doing exactly what users want?
There's a really slippery slope Mozilla looks like it's heading down...
I've bought used high end Dells a generation or two behind for the past 15 years, ever since I've had a laptop. I've had an Inspiron 8000, 8200, 9400, and for the past 4+ years a Precision M6500, which is a beast -- i7-920XM,16 GB RAM (which can be expanded to 32 GB), 2x2.5" bays, optical bay, mSATA, 17" WUXGA screen w/Radeon HD7820, a pair of USB3 ports, and an eSATA port. The only things I've had to replace have been the keyboard twice (due to my sloppiness around it; it's no more fragile than any other), the battery, and some memory that developed errors (not likely due to the laptop). I've run various versions of openSUSE on it with no problems of any kind, and no blobs either. The tech's a bit dated -- first generation i7, SATA2 (3 Gb/sec), only 2 USB3 ports -- but with the mSATA it's plenty fast for the photo processing I do on it. If you need something more up to date, you can pay a bit more for a used M6600 or M6700, although you'll give up the WUXGA. No mechanical problems with the lids and that that I had with the 8000 and 8200 (the 9400 was disappointing, having a 64 bit processor but basically set up as a 32 bit system that couldn't exceed 3 GB of usable RAM).
There's no comparison between the low end and the high end Dell laptops. The high end ones are built solidly, easy to repair and upgrade, and just plain feel solid. Of course, this puppy isn't light, and the power brick itself is substantial. Battery life isn't great either. But if you want a solid system that will run Linux well and won't give you any trouble, this is worth considering. If you want a smaller system, the Precision M4x00 is a 15" screen but otherwise basically the same, I believe (it may not have the second drive bay).
I'd have gotten the Galaxy Mega except that it's considerably inferior (less RAM, slower processor) to the Galaxy Note 2 that I wound up getting. I have it in an Otterbox Defender case that at least doubles, if not triples, the thickness of the phone.
I have no difficulty holding and using it. I can do it 1-handed when I want for simple things like dialing, but I prefer 2-handed operation in general most of the time. A smaller phone would be very hard to use that way. Even the Note feels annoyingly cramped compare to my 10" tablet (HP Touchpad running CyanogenMod); the 15% bigger (linear) screen of the Mega would have been preferable. Dunno offhand whether there's an Otterbox-type case available for it; that's a dealbreaker.
But the consequences to an airplane full of people, and people on the ground in the path of any hypothetical debris, are very different.
Most explosives that are stable enough to make it from a person's home to an airport are stable enough not to detonate without an appropriate detonating device. Once they're safely in that barrel, there's nothing to activate them. If they're in the air, in the possession of someone who wants to do something bad with them and has something to detonate them with (which might not be obvious), they can be activated.
Again, I'm not defending this particular rule, which looks to me to be a massively overbroad reaction to a one-time incident.
The FAA's role is to be extremely cautious. Aviation's one of those things where minor mistakes can have disastrous consequences. Same kind of thing as with medical devices: they had better work, perfectly, every time. And since individual components can fail, the backup systems also need to just plain work. The more outside factors can interfere with the system, the harder it is to analyze down to some large number of 9's. So don't expect the FAA to move quickly when it comes to authorizing any changes, including RF that might or might not be generated from the cabin. Given the wide range of consumer electronics, they want to make sure that the worst case scenario won't come close to generating problems for the avionics, particularly during takeoff and landing. They'll get around to it, but only after doing lots of homework. I wouldn't want to fly on a plane whose owner is allowed to cut corners on safety; the airlines would do everything they could to save money.
The internet is a very different kind of system, and the role of government regulation is different. I *do* want government regulation of the form that protects us from "regulation" by private service providers -- things like upload/download limits, preferential treatment for certain kinds of content, functionality with all devices (I don't want to be told that I have to run Windows, for example). Net neutrality requires either effective government regulation or real competition, and for some strange reason, real competition in telecommunications doesn't seem to be a stable situation. Look at what's happened since ATT was broken up; the industry has reconsolidated around a couple of big companies that seem content to divide up the pie rather than seriously compete with one another.
Chattanooga, Tennessee is doing very nicely with public internet. Around here my only choice for fast internet seems to be Comcast, with its high prices and 250 GB monthly cap (I ran a script on my system, and found that it's not hard to hit half of that, on a much lower bandwidth DSL line). Verizon hasn't bothered to build out FIOS to my area, and while that may be fast compared to most of the US, it would be very slow in Chattanooga (or many other countries).
I just don't believe that that kind of situation is going to get fixed without government regulation. Google is in the process of building out Kansas City (?), but that kind of piecemeal approach isn't going to solve the broader problem.
The consequences of having something go boom on the ground are very different from the consequences of same happening in the air.
That said, this particular rule is almost surely a massive overreaction to a one-time unsuccessful event. Obviously there are certain liquids we don't want on planes, but the same applies to certain solids (and I'm sure any self-respecting nerd can come up with plenty of them, including ones that are sensitive to water), and I don't see why the liquid vs. solid state has much to do with it.
I have a used Dell M6500. It's a big machine, but (almost) everything works just fine under OpenSUSE 12.1 and 12.2. It's a 17" WUXGA display (much better than the 1920x1080 on the newer models), 4 DIMM slots with 32 GB capacity, 2 drive slots, Radeon HD5800 (works fine with recent Xorg, with full HW acceleration), and an mSATA slot which I'll eventually populate. It's a first generation i7-920 mobile, so newer processors might be faster, but it's still a fast, powerful machine.
The only things that don't work:
1) USB 3.0 ports cause all sorts of problems with my USB 3.0 card reader. Could be the reader, could be the kernel driver.
2) If I enable OpenGL compositing under KDE 4.x, I get some display glitches with emacs and xterm. Switching to the other option (which is still hardware accelerated) gets rid of those.
I was amazed when I heard about that (I knew it before this). I'm a bit of an old timer, but the start of that streak predated my college years.
Caltech's basketball program has been improving some in recent years. Their head coach, Oliver Eslinger, was previously associate head coach at MIT under Larry Anderson. Last year they were 5-20, which isn't very good, but was still their best record in years. They beat two D3 teams, Macalester (which was a very weak team) and Babson (which wasn't). Babson finished with a 14-13 record, 6-6 conference (NEWMAC, which has some strong teams, MIT, WPI, and Springfield in particular, but nobody in NEWMAC is really weak).
But if we're going to talk nerd/basketball stories, MIT being in the D3 Final Four last year and currently ranked #1 is the big one.
Grinnell is NCAA Division III. But don't worry -- most D3 teams take their basketball a lot more seriously than this, and there's a lot of excellent (if less athletic than D1) basketball. D3 schools don't give scholarships.
Apparently, it's not normally the case that they give one player the chance to do this. Usually no one goes more than 20 minutes, and everyone's in on the platoon system, so everyone gets minutes and shooting opportunities. They make an exception when they want to set an individual scoring record. I suspect some of the players like the notoriety, but otherwise he gives them all an opportunity at some time or other to have a big game.
From the comments on d3boards, it sounded like it was a mutual decision to give this particular player the shot at the record. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the other team knew in advance what was going on (one of their players had 70 points himself, so I wonder if there was an agreement, formal or otherwise, to allow this).
Regardless, an idiotic game. I might just be willing to pay admission, though, to watch UW-Whitewater (say) demolish them.
There's nothing wrong per se with a run-and-press game, within reason -- but remember how in the 1980's and 1990's nobody wanted to draw Princeton in the first round of the D1 tourney (Princeton played exactly the opposite kind of game, and they almost upset Georgetown among others).
Looking at their record on d3hoops.com, they won a lot of games, but most years (at least since the mid-2000's) their final game was a loss to a conference team -- which I assumed was a conference playoff. However, at least from what I've read, they've never won a game in the NCAA (Division III) tournament.
Looking at past standings (http://www.midwestconference.org/sports/2011/4/15/MBB_0415112348.aspx), it looks like the last time they actually won their conference (defined as winning the conference tournament, not the regular season record) was 2000-2001. Last year, the 10 teams of the Midwest Conference had an overall 32-26 record against non-conference opponents (not necessarily all NCAA D3). By way of comparison, MIT's conference (NEWMAC) had a 69-31 record out of conference (7 teams), and every team had a better record overall than in conference (and a lot of teams play a lot of their non-conference games against NESCAC and other very strong programs).
Based on that, I stand by my statement: Grinnell has won a lot of games, but not against strong opponents (either the best teams in their conference when it most matters, or good D3 teams in the NCAA tournament). It would be interesting to see how they stack up against really good teams from the region, like Illinois Wesleyan or Wisconsin-Whitewater (which are good year after year). Whitewater was able to shut down our best outside shooter (6'4" Jamie Karraker), despite all but one of our starting lineup averaging in double figures (the one who didn't averaged 9.9 ppg), and I don't think Grinnell would pose any challenge to them.
Faith Baptist Bible isn't even a Division III team. Everything I've read, from people in the know (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.12195 -- starting around page 814) indicates that Grinnell specifically intended to have Jack Taylor set this record. He literally wasn't playing defense -- he was standing around at halfcourt to receive an outlet pass so he could jack up yet another 3.
Somebody watching the video noticed that Faith was cheering this on, and the Grinnell crowd was cheering scoring by both teams (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.msg1469592). I have a suspicion that they were in on this joke. Given that their opponent was not an NCAA team, I don't think this record should count.
It's interesting that for all this, they've never won an NCAA tourney game (Division III, that is). I don't think they've even won their conference (see http://d3hoops.com/teams/Grinnell/Men/2011-12/index and look at the other years -- usually their last game is against a conference team, and they've always lost). That kind of run and gun and press may be fun to play and watch, but it doesn't work against good teams.
And there's plenty of very good basketball being played in Division III. Yes, it's very rare for Division III teams to beat Division I, but a couple of weeks ago MIT lost to Harvard 69-54, and the game was not a blowout -- Harvard had to work hard for its W (Harvard shortly thereafter beat Manhattan College, which is also Division I, 79-45). If you watch the real power teams in Division III -- schools like MIT (yes, MIT is ranked #1 in Division III right now, and they have some damn good players, including a point guard, Mitchell Kates, who was abusing the Harvard back court all game), Amherst, Williams, Franklin and Marshall, Cabrini, UW-Whitewater (which beat MIT last year in the semifinal, and went on to win the title), it's very high quality basketball, just not the kind of athleticism you'll find in Division I. Teams like these, that play real defense and are in control on offense, would make short work of Grinnell.
And one of our (MIT) alumni, Jimmy Bartolotta '09, was Division III national Player of the Year, and is now playing professional basketball in Iceland.
(Yes, I'm an Ancient and Honorable Nerd of the Infinite Corridor -- VI-3 '87. I'm unofficially one of the team photographers. See http://rlk.smugmug.com/Sports/Basketball)
If I were to get a smartphone, I'd prefer a high resolution display of at least 5". And I wouldn't worry about how thin it was, either, if that meant better battery life. This would be comparable in size (but probably a bit heavier, with lots of battery) to my wife's GPS, which with a good belt holster I don't believe would be any trouble to carry around.
Then again, I'm 6'5" and don't mind looking nerdly (which I am, after all).
This is the 17" beast (or actually, the previous generation -- the M6600 is current). I don't particularly like the keyboard (my old Inspiron 9400 had a better one), but it's better than most laptops and it does have a keypad. It also has oodles of expansion capability -- fingerprint reader, smartcard reader, 32 GB RAM, 2 2.5" disks, mSATA (so you can have 3 disks!), USB 3. I bought mine on eBay (had it about 6 months so far), but you can probably still get refurbs from Dell.
The M6600 has faster processor options (Sandy Bridge vs. Nehalem), but just like everything else, an inferior screen. Since I do a lot of photo work on it, it's a substantial difference. Thus far I only have 8GB and 2 rotating disks, but at some point I'm going to add another 8 or 16 GB (it has 4 slots) and probably an mSATA for root/home/swap.
The Precisions are really mobile workstations. The M6500 is a big, heavy machine, about 8 lb. But it's actually dimensionally a bit smaller than my old 9400, and it easily fits a standard 17" laptop bag. The Alienware M17x has similar specs, but the appearance is very different (the Alienware looks like a gaming machine; the Precision has a very basic unadorned appearance, with just a small Dell logo on the lid).
As it happens, I actually knew Shiva in high school (I was one year behind him in Livingston -- class of 1982; he was class of 1981). We lived about 1/4 mile apart, and took the same bus to and from school. We were both science/math geeks.
I do remember (not the details) the project he's talking about. We discussed it on the bus. He did indeed submit it to the Westinghouse Talent Search, and as I recall he got past the first round. It certainly was an interesting project for the time, and my recollection is that he designed it very well and he well deserved to advance. I don't know one way or the other whether he came up with it independently, but he most certainly didn't invent email.
It has been well over a decade since I last saw him.
I consider myself to favor progressive tax policies, but even I think this goes too far.
"Mark to market" has a lot of problems. As you say, the market price at any given moment in time simply reflects the price at which the most recent sale of any size was executed. There's no guarantee that any other sale would be executed at that price, and if a large volume of the item (or security) were to be sold all at once, it's unlikely that anything close to that price would be realized. So even leaving aside that this is a wealth tax rather than an income tax, it's not taxing actual wealth; it's taxing wealth assuming an arbitrary valuation.
This kind of thing could easily be gamed. Suppose at the end of the year someone arranged to sell a small block of securities at an artificially low price right at the closing bell? Presumably regulations could be passed to inhibit this, but I'm sure there would still be plenty of possibilities.
Furthermore, what happens when the security's price goes down? Does everyone holding it get a rebate? Or it is really nothing more than an annual wealth tax?
I'm not opposed on principle to a wealth tax, and I understand the issue of using an appreciated security as collateral to float a loan that could be more or less constantly renewed. And while a security's price is "stepped up" when passing through probate, I believe the estate still pays tax on the security's value at the time of death (but IANAL).
Right now I'd suggest a higher end point & shoot (e. g. Canon G or SX series, depending upon what you're looking for) more than a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. The image quality, particularly at high ISO, will indeed be better with an EVIL due to the larger sensor (although some of the EVIL cameras, such as the new Nikons, use a rather small sensor), but they're less convenient, and don't really have more features, than a good P&S.
My Canon SX-1, for example, has the equivalent of 28-560 zoom range, and quite good macro capability. It can also use an E-TTL flash (I use my 550EX on it, occasionally). Some of the newer ones have wider angle lenses than that, although not as wide as the Olympus 7-14 (14-28 equivalent) lens available on micro 4/3.
But if convenience and telephoto capability is more important, a P&S will still beat an EVIL, and for a lot less money to boot.
Some kinds of timing attacks are. I think I heard once that a timing attack could be made against passwords in TOPS-20, because the passwords were stored in plaintext and compared one character at a time. The trick was to do the system call to check the password (or whatever it was) with the guess split across a page boundary (maybe the second page was forced out of memory or something). Since the system call would return as soon as one character didn't match, it was easy to see if the next character being guessed was correct or not. The fix was simple enough. Obviously there was a bit more to it than that, but I only heard this apocryphally as it was, and at that probably about 25 years ago.
This kind of thing is harder to fix, since it depends upon the difference between cache and non-cache access time, and the non-cached access time is not deterministic. It would be possible for the browser to introduce an artificial delay into the appropriate JavaScript calls, but that would make performance go down the tubes.
In any event, I tried it and the results didn't look very accurate (the first time, all of the sites it tried claimed that I had hit them; the secon time it caimed only one site was in cache, and after that it thought that nothing was).
I've had a variety of high end (for their time) Dell laptops, and generally have not had problems. Over the past 10 years or so, I've had an Inspiron 8000, 8200, 9400/E1705, and most recently a Precision M6500, which is the best of the lot. I've always bought them used. They tend to be very easy to upgrade, and it's no trouble finding parts on eBay. I've run SUSE/OpenSUSE on everything. Since the 8200, I've had no problems with suspend/resume; the 9400 failed to resume maybe once out of every 100 tries. The M6500 has had a few more suspend/resume failures, but lately it has been much more reliable; I'm not sure why.
I'm careful to look for sellers with very high positive feedback (at least 99.7% for something like a laptop, and preferably at least 99.9%), and I look hard at the negative feedback (there is some junk negative feedback out there -- some people clearly make no attempt to resolve issues with the seller, for example).
Of course, if you want something equivalent to AppleCare, you're going to have to go with a new piece from System 76, Emperor Linux, or the like.
I took a quick look on eBay, and it looks like M6500's go for about 25% less than the closest equivalent 17" MacBook Pro. They're also more expandable. But that's just my take on the matter.
Incidentally, I consider the M6500 to be more desirable than the current M6600. They both have the same expansion capability (2x2.5" drives plus an mSATA, 32 GB RAM, 2xUSB2, 2xUSB3, eSATA, plenty of wireless options including WWAN, and the other usual suspects), but the M6500 has a 16:10 screen (1920x1200) while the M6600 has a 16:9 screen (1920x1080). For photo work, that's about 23% more pixels on the older machine; even if I did watch movies, I don't care about the slight letterboxing. Obviously, you can plug external monitors into both, but that's not how I usually operate. I think Dell did this for cost reasons, since that's what the screen makers prefer to make, but on a flagship laptop like the M6600, that doesn't make a lot of sense. On the Alienware, sure; that's a gaming machine, but the M6600 is a portable workstation. The only advantage of the M6600 that I can see is that it uses Sandy Bridge rather than Nehalem processors and has newer graphics options, but you're going to get more of a speed boost in practice from your memory and disk configuration. Anyhow, the M6500 is very easy to work on; you don't have to remove nearly as many screws as the older ones, and everything is seated very solidly.
AdBlock Plus and NoScript are doing different things -- ABP is basically a filter engine, and the rules are the only thing that (normally) needs to be updated. NoScript is blocking things based on various algorithms, so it's procedural rather than data-driven. It's not surprising that NoScript's engine needs to be updated more often than ABP's.
"Causing harm to animals" is extremely vague. Would it mean, for example, that a restaurant that serves meat couldn't use it? Would it mean that I couldn't use such an application to order meat from a grocery store, or buy leather shoes?
There's a very good reason why both the free software and open source definitions forbid field of use restrictions (and even most proprietary software doesn't try things like this).
Slashdot Mirror
What does "[c]ontent blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising)" mean? Most users *want* to block specific types of content, namely advertising (particularly obtrusive, bandwidth-heavy ads). People don't want to block something just because it's bandwidth-heavy, otherwise they'd be blocking videos and such that they do want to watch.
And how's this going to play with Firefox's mandatory extension signing that's scheduled to take effect with FF43? Will they refuse to sign extensions that don't follow these guidelines, thereby going beyond a model of simply ensuring that the extension isn't harmful? Will they get around that by defining extensions that don't follow these guidelines as "harmful", even if they're doing exactly what users want?
There's a really slippery slope Mozilla looks like it's heading down...
and then it will be a *real* beast.
I've bought used high end Dells a generation or two behind for the past 15 years, ever since I've had a laptop. I've had an Inspiron 8000, 8200, 9400, and for the past 4+ years a Precision M6500, which is a beast -- i7-920XM,16 GB RAM (which can be expanded to 32 GB), 2x2.5" bays, optical bay, mSATA, 17" WUXGA screen w/Radeon HD7820, a pair of USB3 ports, and an eSATA port. The only things I've had to replace have been the keyboard twice (due to my sloppiness around it; it's no more fragile than any other), the battery, and some memory that developed errors (not likely due to the laptop). I've run various versions of openSUSE on it with no problems of any kind, and no blobs either. The tech's a bit dated -- first generation i7, SATA2 (3 Gb/sec), only 2 USB3 ports -- but with the mSATA it's plenty fast for the photo processing I do on it. If you need something more up to date, you can pay a bit more for a used M6600 or M6700, although you'll give up the WUXGA. No mechanical problems with the lids and that that I had with the 8000 and 8200 (the 9400 was disappointing, having a 64 bit processor but basically set up as a 32 bit system that couldn't exceed 3 GB of usable RAM).
There's no comparison between the low end and the high end Dell laptops. The high end ones are built solidly, easy to repair and upgrade, and just plain feel solid. Of course, this puppy isn't light, and the power brick itself is substantial. Battery life isn't great either. But if you want a solid system that will run Linux well and won't give you any trouble, this is worth considering. If you want a smaller system, the Precision M4x00 is a 15" screen but otherwise basically the same, I believe (it may not have the second drive bay).
about "GNOME" and "excellent interface design", aren't you?
Put a 3200x1800 (or 4200x2400 to match the resolution) screen in a Precision with the i7 version of that chip, and now we'd be talking.
I'd have gotten the Galaxy Mega except that it's considerably inferior (less RAM, slower processor) to the Galaxy Note 2 that I wound up getting. I have it in an Otterbox Defender case that at least doubles, if not triples, the thickness of the phone.
I have no difficulty holding and using it. I can do it 1-handed when I want for simple things like dialing, but I prefer 2-handed operation in general most of the time. A smaller phone would be very hard to use that way. Even the Note feels annoyingly cramped compare to my 10" tablet (HP Touchpad running CyanogenMod); the 15% bigger (linear) screen of the Mega would have been preferable. Dunno offhand whether there's an Otterbox-type case available for it; that's a dealbreaker.
But the consequences to an airplane full of people, and people on the ground in the path of any hypothetical debris, are very different.
Most explosives that are stable enough to make it from a person's home to an airport are stable enough not to detonate without an appropriate detonating device. Once they're safely in that barrel, there's nothing to activate them. If they're in the air, in the possession of someone who wants to do something bad with them and has something to detonate them with (which might not be obvious), they can be activated.
Again, I'm not defending this particular rule, which looks to me to be a massively overbroad reaction to a one-time incident.
The FAA's role is to be extremely cautious. Aviation's one of those things where minor mistakes can have disastrous consequences. Same kind of thing as with medical devices: they had better work, perfectly, every time. And since individual components can fail, the backup systems also need to just plain work. The more outside factors can interfere with the system, the harder it is to analyze down to some large number of 9's. So don't expect the FAA to move quickly when it comes to authorizing any changes, including RF that might or might not be generated from the cabin. Given the wide range of consumer electronics, they want to make sure that the worst case scenario won't come close to generating problems for the avionics, particularly during takeoff and landing. They'll get around to it, but only after doing lots of homework. I wouldn't want to fly on a plane whose owner is allowed to cut corners on safety; the airlines would do everything they could to save money.
The internet is a very different kind of system, and the role of government regulation is different. I *do* want government regulation of the form that protects us from "regulation" by private service providers -- things like upload/download limits, preferential treatment for certain kinds of content, functionality with all devices (I don't want to be told that I have to run Windows, for example). Net neutrality requires either effective government regulation or real competition, and for some strange reason, real competition in telecommunications doesn't seem to be a stable situation. Look at what's happened since ATT was broken up; the industry has reconsolidated around a couple of big companies that seem content to divide up the pie rather than seriously compete with one another.
Chattanooga, Tennessee is doing very nicely with public internet. Around here my only choice for fast internet seems to be Comcast, with its high prices and 250 GB monthly cap (I ran a script on my system, and found that it's not hard to hit half of that, on a much lower bandwidth DSL line). Verizon hasn't bothered to build out FIOS to my area, and while that may be fast compared to most of the US, it would be very slow in Chattanooga (or many other countries).
I just don't believe that that kind of situation is going to get fixed without government regulation. Google is in the process of building out Kansas City (?), but that kind of piecemeal approach isn't going to solve the broader problem.
The consequences of having something go boom on the ground are very different from the consequences of same happening in the air.
That said, this particular rule is almost surely a massive overreaction to a one-time unsuccessful event. Obviously there are certain liquids we don't want on planes, but the same applies to certain solids (and I'm sure any self-respecting nerd can come up with plenty of them, including ones that are sensitive to water), and I don't see why the liquid vs. solid state has much to do with it.
I have a used Dell M6500. It's a big machine, but (almost) everything works just fine under OpenSUSE 12.1 and 12.2. It's a 17" WUXGA display (much better than the 1920x1080 on the newer models), 4 DIMM slots with 32 GB capacity, 2 drive slots, Radeon HD5800 (works fine with recent Xorg, with full HW acceleration), and an mSATA slot which I'll eventually populate. It's a first generation i7-920 mobile, so newer processors might be faster, but it's still a fast, powerful machine.
The only things that don't work:
1) USB 3.0 ports cause all sorts of problems with my USB 3.0 card reader. Could be the reader, could be the kernel driver.
2) If I enable OpenGL compositing under KDE 4.x, I get some display glitches with emacs and xterm. Switching to the other option (which is still hardware accelerated) gets rid of those.
I was amazed when I heard about that (I knew it before this). I'm a bit of an old timer, but the start of that streak predated my college years.
Caltech's basketball program has been improving some in recent years. Their head coach, Oliver Eslinger, was previously associate head coach at MIT under Larry Anderson. Last year they were 5-20, which isn't very good, but was still their best record in years. They beat two D3 teams, Macalester (which was a very weak team) and Babson (which wasn't). Babson finished with a 14-13 record, 6-6 conference (NEWMAC, which has some strong teams, MIT, WPI, and Springfield in particular, but nobody in NEWMAC is really weak).
But if we're going to talk nerd/basketball stories, MIT being in the D3 Final Four last year and currently ranked #1 is the big one.
Grinnell is NCAA Division III. But don't worry -- most D3 teams take their basketball a lot more seriously than this, and there's a lot of excellent (if less athletic than D1) basketball. D3 schools don't give scholarships.
Apparently, it's not normally the case that they give one player the chance to do this. Usually no one goes more than 20 minutes, and everyone's in on the platoon system, so everyone gets minutes and shooting opportunities. They make an exception when they want to set an individual scoring record. I suspect some of the players like the notoriety, but otherwise he gives them all an opportunity at some time or other to have a big game.
From the comments on d3boards, it sounded like it was a mutual decision to give this particular player the shot at the record. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the other team knew in advance what was going on (one of their players had 70 points himself, so I wonder if there was an agreement, formal or otherwise, to allow this).
Regardless, an idiotic game. I might just be willing to pay admission, though, to watch UW-Whitewater (say) demolish them.
There's nothing wrong per se with a run-and-press game, within reason -- but remember how in the 1980's and 1990's nobody wanted to draw Princeton in the first round of the D1 tourney (Princeton played exactly the opposite kind of game, and they almost upset Georgetown among others).
Looking at their record on d3hoops.com, they won a lot of games, but most years (at least since the mid-2000's) their final game was a loss to a conference team -- which I assumed was a conference playoff. However, at least from what I've read, they've never won a game in the NCAA (Division III) tournament.
Looking at past standings (http://www.midwestconference.org/sports/2011/4/15/MBB_0415112348.aspx), it looks like the last time they actually won their conference (defined as winning the conference tournament, not the regular season record) was 2000-2001. Last year, the 10 teams of the Midwest Conference had an overall 32-26 record against non-conference opponents (not necessarily all NCAA D3). By way of comparison, MIT's conference (NEWMAC) had a 69-31 record out of conference (7 teams), and every team had a better record overall than in conference (and a lot of teams play a lot of their non-conference games against NESCAC and other very strong programs).
Based on that, I stand by my statement: Grinnell has won a lot of games, but not against strong opponents (either the best teams in their conference when it most matters, or good D3 teams in the NCAA tournament). It would be interesting to see how they stack up against really good teams from the region, like Illinois Wesleyan or Wisconsin-Whitewater (which are good year after year). Whitewater was able to shut down our best outside shooter (6'4" Jamie Karraker), despite all but one of our starting lineup averaging in double figures (the one who didn't averaged 9.9 ppg), and I don't think Grinnell would pose any challenge to them.
Faith Baptist Bible isn't even a Division III team. Everything I've read, from people in the know (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.12195 -- starting around page 814) indicates that Grinnell specifically intended to have Jack Taylor set this record. He literally wasn't playing defense -- he was standing around at halfcourt to receive an outlet pass so he could jack up yet another 3.
Somebody watching the video noticed that Faith was cheering this on, and the Grinnell crowd was cheering scoring by both teams (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.msg1469592). I have a suspicion that they were in on this joke. Given that their opponent was not an NCAA team, I don't think this record should count.
It's interesting that for all this, they've never won an NCAA tourney game (Division III, that is). I don't think they've even won their conference (see http://d3hoops.com/teams/Grinnell/Men/2011-12/index and look at the other years -- usually their last game is against a conference team, and they've always lost). That kind of run and gun and press may be fun to play and watch, but it doesn't work against good teams.
And there's plenty of very good basketball being played in Division III. Yes, it's very rare for Division III teams to beat Division I, but a couple of weeks ago MIT lost to Harvard 69-54, and the game was not a blowout -- Harvard had to work hard for its W (Harvard shortly thereafter beat Manhattan College, which is also Division I, 79-45). If you watch the real power teams in Division III -- schools like MIT (yes, MIT is ranked #1 in Division III right now, and they have some damn good players, including a point guard, Mitchell Kates, who was abusing the Harvard back court all game), Amherst, Williams, Franklin and Marshall, Cabrini, UW-Whitewater (which beat MIT last year in the semifinal, and went on to win the title), it's very high quality basketball, just not the kind of athleticism you'll find in Division I. Teams like these, that play real defense and are in control on offense, would make short work of Grinnell.
And one of our (MIT) alumni, Jimmy Bartolotta '09, was Division III national Player of the Year, and is now playing professional basketball in Iceland.
(Yes, I'm an Ancient and Honorable Nerd of the Infinite Corridor -- VI-3 '87. I'm unofficially one of the team photographers. See http://rlk.smugmug.com/Sports/Basketball)
If I were to get a smartphone, I'd prefer a high resolution display of at least 5". And I wouldn't worry about how thin it was, either, if that meant better battery life. This would be comparable in size (but probably a bit heavier, with lots of battery) to my wife's GPS, which with a good belt holster I don't believe would be any trouble to carry around.
Then again, I'm 6'5" and don't mind looking nerdly (which I am, after all).
This is the 17" beast (or actually, the previous generation -- the M6600 is current). I don't particularly like the keyboard (my old Inspiron 9400 had a better one), but it's better than most laptops and it does have a keypad. It also has oodles of expansion capability -- fingerprint reader, smartcard reader, 32 GB RAM, 2 2.5" disks, mSATA (so you can have 3 disks!), USB 3. I bought mine on eBay (had it about 6 months so far), but you can probably still get refurbs from Dell.
The M6600 has faster processor options (Sandy Bridge vs. Nehalem), but just like everything else, an inferior screen. Since I do a lot of photo work on it, it's a substantial difference. Thus far I only have 8GB and 2 rotating disks, but at some point I'm going to add another 8 or 16 GB (it has 4 slots) and probably an mSATA for root/home/swap.
The Precisions are really mobile workstations. The M6500 is a big, heavy machine, about 8 lb. But it's actually dimensionally a bit smaller than my old 9400, and it easily fits a standard 17" laptop bag. The Alienware M17x has similar specs, but the appearance is very different (the Alienware looks like a gaming machine; the Precision has a very basic unadorned appearance, with just a small Dell logo on the lid).
As it happens, I actually knew Shiva in high school (I was one year behind him in Livingston -- class of 1982; he was class of 1981). We lived about 1/4 mile apart, and took the same bus to and from school. We were both science/math geeks.
I do remember (not the details) the project he's talking about. We discussed it on the bus. He did indeed submit it to the Westinghouse Talent Search, and as I recall he got past the first round. It certainly was an interesting project for the time, and my recollection is that he designed it very well and he well deserved to advance. I don't know one way or the other whether he came up with it independently, but he most certainly didn't invent email.
It has been well over a decade since I last saw him.
Custom trays, stapling, and the like are simply printer features, which can be exposed over IPP just as easily as through PPD files.
How does document security at the printer work? And what special features does the imageRUNNER ADVANCE have that can't be expressed in PPD files?
PCL wouldn't be supported, and it would be considered obsolete. Driverless printers would directly render PDF files.
I consider myself to favor progressive tax policies, but even I think this goes too far.
"Mark to market" has a lot of problems. As you say, the market price at any given moment in time simply reflects the price at which the most recent sale of any size was executed. There's no guarantee that any other sale would be executed at that price, and if a large volume of the item (or security) were to be sold all at once, it's unlikely that anything close to that price would be realized. So even leaving aside that this is a wealth tax rather than an income tax, it's not taxing actual wealth; it's taxing wealth assuming an arbitrary valuation.
This kind of thing could easily be gamed. Suppose at the end of the year someone arranged to sell a small block of securities at an artificially low price right at the closing bell? Presumably regulations could be passed to inhibit this, but I'm sure there would still be plenty of possibilities.
Furthermore, what happens when the security's price goes down? Does everyone holding it get a rebate? Or it is really nothing more than an annual wealth tax?
I'm not opposed on principle to a wealth tax, and I understand the issue of using an appreciated security as collateral to float a loan that could be more or less constantly renewed. And while a security's price is "stepped up" when passing through probate, I believe the estate still pays tax on the security's value at the time of death (but IANAL).
Right now I'd suggest a higher end point & shoot (e. g. Canon G or SX series, depending upon what you're looking for) more than a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. The image quality, particularly at high ISO, will indeed be better with an EVIL due to the larger sensor (although some of the EVIL cameras, such as the new Nikons, use a rather small sensor), but they're less convenient, and don't really have more features, than a good P&S.
My Canon SX-1, for example, has the equivalent of 28-560 zoom range, and quite good macro capability. It can also use an E-TTL flash (I use my 550EX on it, occasionally). Some of the newer ones have wider angle lenses than that, although not as wide as the Olympus 7-14 (14-28 equivalent) lens available on micro 4/3.
But if convenience and telephoto capability is more important, a P&S will still beat an EVIL, and for a lot less money to boot.
This kind of timing attack isn't easy to block.
Some kinds of timing attacks are. I think I heard once that a timing attack could be made against passwords in TOPS-20, because the passwords were stored in plaintext and compared one character at a time. The trick was to do the system call to check the password (or whatever it was) with the guess split across a page boundary (maybe the second page was forced out of memory or something). Since the system call would return as soon as one character didn't match, it was easy to see if the next character being guessed was correct or not. The fix was simple enough. Obviously there was a bit more to it than that, but I only heard this apocryphally as it was, and at that probably about 25 years ago.
This kind of thing is harder to fix, since it depends upon the difference between cache and non-cache access time, and the non-cached access time is not deterministic. It would be possible for the browser to introduce an artificial delay into the appropriate JavaScript calls, but that would make performance go down the tubes.
In any event, I tried it and the results didn't look very accurate (the first time, all of the sites it tried claimed that I had hit them; the secon time it caimed only one site was in cache, and after that it thought that nothing was).
I've had a variety of high end (for their time) Dell laptops, and generally have not had problems. Over the past 10 years or so, I've had an Inspiron 8000, 8200, 9400/E1705, and most recently a Precision M6500, which is the best of the lot. I've always bought them used. They tend to be very easy to upgrade, and it's no trouble finding parts on eBay. I've run SUSE/OpenSUSE on everything. Since the 8200, I've had no problems with suspend/resume; the 9400 failed to resume maybe once out of every 100 tries. The M6500 has had a few more suspend/resume failures, but lately it has been much more reliable; I'm not sure why.
I'm careful to look for sellers with very high positive feedback (at least 99.7% for something like a laptop, and preferably at least 99.9%), and I look hard at the negative feedback (there is some junk negative feedback out there -- some people clearly make no attempt to resolve issues with the seller, for example).
Of course, if you want something equivalent to AppleCare, you're going to have to go with a new piece from System 76, Emperor Linux, or the like.
I took a quick look on eBay, and it looks like M6500's go for about 25% less than the closest equivalent 17" MacBook Pro. They're also more expandable. But that's just my take on the matter.
Incidentally, I consider the M6500 to be more desirable than the current M6600. They both have the same expansion capability (2x2.5" drives plus an mSATA, 32 GB RAM, 2xUSB2, 2xUSB3, eSATA, plenty of wireless options including WWAN, and the other usual suspects), but the M6500 has a 16:10 screen (1920x1200) while the M6600 has a 16:9 screen (1920x1080). For photo work, that's about 23% more pixels on the older machine; even if I did watch movies, I don't care about the slight letterboxing. Obviously, you can plug external monitors into both, but that's not how I usually operate. I think Dell did this for cost reasons, since that's what the screen makers prefer to make, but on a flagship laptop like the M6600, that doesn't make a lot of sense. On the Alienware, sure; that's a gaming machine, but the M6600 is a portable workstation. The only advantage of the M6600 that I can see is that it uses Sandy Bridge rather than Nehalem processors and has newer graphics options, but you're going to get more of a speed boost in practice from your memory and disk configuration. Anyhow, the M6500 is very easy to work on; you don't have to remove nearly as many screws as the older ones, and everything is seated very solidly.
AdBlock Plus and NoScript are doing different things -- ABP is basically a filter engine, and the rules are the only thing that (normally) needs to be updated. NoScript is blocking things based on various algorithms, so it's procedural rather than data-driven. It's not surprising that NoScript's engine needs to be updated more often than ABP's.
Where would this end, anyway?
"Causing harm to animals" is extremely vague. Would it mean, for example, that a restaurant that serves meat couldn't use it? Would it mean that I couldn't use such an application to order meat from a grocery store, or buy leather shoes?
There's a very good reason why both the free software and open source definitions forbid field of use restrictions (and even most proprietary software doesn't try things like this).