So, let's lump all of China together, I mean, it's not like it's very big or anything.
Sure, some parts of China are short of water. Others have plenty. This sort of non-reporting is just ranting by some anti-tech journalist looking for a victim.
I'll go one farther: no fish, prepared correctly, tastes fishy. The fishy smell comes, AFAIK, from fish oils going rancid. Fish has to be fresh, prepared quickly and served. Alternatively, it can be preserved by smoking or other means - but must, of course, be fresh when processed.
Take trout, as a fish most people know. Wash and scale within a few hours of catching them. Either eat them immediately, or flash freeze them, or smoke them. The cooked fish should not have any fishy smell. Maybe your dishes will, after sitting in the sink a couple of hours, but that's a different problem...
This is offensive. The National Academy is supposed to be a scientific organization, not a pile of lobbiests. The whole AGW mess comes because scientists have mixed up science with politics.
Three simple steps: open mouth, insert foot, destroy credibility.
I have to agree. While it's great that the European countries take privacy seriously, there is a real problem here. If someone transmits radio waves into public space - heck, into your house, your car and through your body - just how can any sensible person say you do not have a right to receive those radio waves? This is especially ridiculous outcomes in the case of wireless networks, since practically every European citizen carries a wireless receiver (in their mobile phone) all the time. There can be no expectation of privacy here.
As a related anecdote, Google has gotten in trouble in Switzerland because their camera is mounted higher than a person's normal eye level. This is a much more valid complaint, as it means that the camera occasionally sees over hedges and fences and into windows that people did reasonably consider to be out of the public view.
An excellent demonstration...of why automation should never attempt to take control of a car. Software errors, hardware failures, unreliable sensor technology, and an endless supply of unforeseeable situations mean that automation simply cannot be reliable.
Example: Our car has collison sensors - in heavy snowstorms, they warn us continually of imminent crashes with snowflakes.
Absolutely right! Most so-called CP laws should be rescinded, because they have nothing whatsoever to do with CP.
The original purpose of CP laws was to protect children from sexual abuse. They were never meant to prevent parents from taking pictures of their kids playing at the waterpark; they should not force parents to undergo background checks before they can set foot in their kids' kindergarten, etc, etc. All of these extensions come at the price of the rights and freedom of the vast majority of innocent people, and do nothing whatsoever to prevent real crime.
Politicians and helicopter parents have pushed this whole area so far beyond common sense that we actually have people (like the poster below) who think the police should get involved if you have several dozen pictures of clothed children! As a coach of a kids team, as a school teacher, or maybe as a grandparent with lots of grandkids, am I going to get a very special interview? Gee, thanks...
If someone forces a child to do something sexual, that is a crime. The original CP laws said: if you purchase a picture of a sexual crime involving a minor, that too is a crime. The justification here is: even though the purchaser had nothing to do with the original crime, by criminalizing purchase, one might be able to dry up the market that supports the original crimes. This original idea was extended to cover possession (not just purchase), which already strays from the original justification.
In recent years, it has been stretched beyond all reason. It makes no sense at all to prohibit innocent pictures (i.e., kids taking a bath, kids at the beach), nor to prohibit activities that do not even involve children (like tasteless cartoons). This is legislating "good taste" and has nothing at all to do with either children or with crime prevention.
What sensationalist blather. Fusion has been "just around the corner" for 50 years now. Anyway, even if it really is true this time, some environmentalist group would put a stop to it - funny how they think electricity just magically comes out of the plug without having to actually be generated anywhere.
Ok, ok, it's in German. But the article in "Spiegel" starts out by implying this is no big deal. Here's a quick'n'dirty translation of the first bit:
"It sounds momentous: The commissioner for privacy, Peter Schaar, said in a press release that 'Google street view vehicles are equipped with WLAN scanners'. He further explains that he is 'horrified by the purposes to which these scans...are being put'."
The article then goes on to say that a little research reveals that this is all well-known and has been since 2008. This is all legal in Germany, and in fact there are other companies and organizations that do similar things. The article itself mainly informs the user of the general situation, and asks a couple of open questions. In particular, it worries that some over-reacting judge may declare MAC-addresses to be related to personal identity, and therefore subject to privacy regulations.
In a nutshell, it's much ado about nothing, basically a clueless commissioner decides to try to make a name for himself.
The author is right: as you buy bigger screens, you expect a higher pixel count. But this just isn't true anymore. In fact, pixel counts are down from what they were 20 years ago.
The premium 4x3 monitor from Dell: Dell UltraSharp 2007FP, 51 cm ( 20,1" ) has a resolution of 1600x1200.
Twenty years ago, I was running a 21" Viewsonic CRT 2560x1920. Now, their best 22" monitor (not TV, monitor) boasts only 1680x1050.
I understand that LCD-monitors and televions have overlapping markets. What I don't understand is that high resolution monitors are now almost unabtainable. Anyone who does any sort of development surely wants more pixels.
In many other countries, the bank notes are different sizes, and the designs are completely revised every few years. Somehow, the ATMs and bill-counters don't have to be replaced. Probably because they don't rely on 1950s mechanical technology.
Even so, it's not hard.As long as the treasury lets it be known that more and more bills will change size, the ATM manufacturers will account for this in new models. Old ATMs will be restricted to handing out the "old size" notes - no problem, because when you administer an ATM, you can decide what bank notes it hands out. By the time all of the bills have been modernized, the ATMs will have been replaced anyway.
Seriously, the bills in the US are terrible from an accessibility point of view.
Any reasonable employer supports education for its employees, within reason. There are, of course, abuses possible on both sides: employers who won't pay or offer any time on the job for studying, and employers who are generous and then get taken advantage of.
Basically you want - and should expect - is the middle ground. Both employer and employee benefit from a certification; both should chip in. My previous employer had a really nice policy here for MS certifications: they paid the exam fees and offered you one hour per week for several months that you could use on-the-job for studying. One week each month, that hour was a tutorial plus Q&A session held by the company's top developers.
Just a reminder, for anyone who has not been on the business side of it: the credit card companies would prefer that you used credit cards. That way, instead of a flat fee of a few cents, they take a percentage of the gross. This either cuts into the merchant's margin, or else they will pass it on to you in the form of higher prices. Either way, the credit card companies make out like bandits.
That sounds like my story. I tried EQ, and some other online game (don't remember which). DDO gets a lot right - giving you private instances of dungeons, no gruntwork (mining, crafting, whatever) required to succeed, etc, etc. A fun game, and "free" play means that our family has spent more here than we did at EQ in monthly fees.With EQ, I really resented the weeks when I was paying but had no time to play. The attraction of the DDO model is being able to choose if and when you payg.
This sort of arrangement with a third party is disquieting, and frankly reeks of either desperation or some PHB boss or marketing type who has no understanding of their customers. As the parent said: I will stick around a short while, hoping to hear that they regret ever trying such a bone-headed idea.
Password aging is not only irritating for users, it causes them to choose even worse passwords, or to write their passwords down. If you are lucky, and they do neither of these, then it is very likely that they will use "strong-password-1", "strong-password-2".
If you like sci-fi or fantasy, buy your books from Baen Books. They sell eBooks directly to the customer, no DRM, pricing at about $2 per book (more for collections). Also, they give many books away for free - the first book in a trilogy, etc.
The free books are in the Baen Free Library, the shop is called Webscription.net.
Support publishers like this, and the other publishers will have to fall in line.
First, as you point out, the bill is very vague. As we know all too well, that means it will be interpreted to mean whatever the president wants it to mean, regardless of the original intent.
Second, the bill won't do anything particularly useful. If they are really worried about cyber attacks, the answer is to connect critical installations to a hardened, private network. Any connection to the public internet could be restricted to non-critical systems, that could be shut down if necessary.
In the end, this is a bill written by people who know little or nothing about technical realities. But it sounds good and is printed in a fancy font, so it will probably pass...
Which Switzerland do you live in? Also living in Switzerland, I can tell you that there are plenty of cheaper models on the roads. Go look in the parking lot at the Migros (the largest supermarket chain).
What is different is that your car registration must be renewed every two years, and any significant, visible rust is forbidden. Hence, you don't find any rust-buckets or junkers on the roads.
Ah, in that case my apologies. Somehow on the threshold I had set, I saw your comment about seatbelts following an entirely reasonable complaint about the warnings being nuisances. I must have mislooked - and thought the one was the direct reply to the other.
And you, sir, are missing the point. We will almost certainly ask our mechanic if he can disable some of the warnings in our car. Not because we dont wear seatbelts, but because the warnings are a nuisance, and sometimes actually dangerous (see below).
There is the parking assistant that beeps when you are close to an object in front of your car. Fine for parking. Drive slowly in a blizzard, and it beeps at the snowflakes, driving you absolutely nuts in the process.
There is the warning that an object is close behind you. This is supposed to detect automatically if you have a trailer. But sometimes it does not - for no reason we can figure. So you get to tow your trailer, with the car yammering at you the entire trip.
There is the warning for glare ice. Implemented so that anytime the temperature changes to 3 degrees centigrade, it warns you. On dry roads, on wet roads, it doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter if it has already warned you 10 times on the same trip.
Or even take the seat-belt warning: If I go shopping, or put my gym bag on the seat, the thing goes off. Do I really have to strap my groceries and my gym bag in?
Warnings with so many false positives are counterproductive. Either people find them so irritating that they disable the things. Or else they get in the habit of ignoring them. Either way, the warnings wind up useless as such - but they can distract at critical moments.
To illustrate that last: I was driving on nasty, icy roads. My car started to skid on glare ice (by the way, no warning, as it was below 3 degrees outside). At this moment, I discovered a warning I had never heard before: the car knew it was skidding and blared at me. Thanks a lot - I knew bloody well I was skidding, and I really, really did not appreciate that distraction at that particular moment in time.
Warning should (a) essentially never have false positives, (b) only warn you if it something you might not notice on your own (and can do something about), and (c) be configurable by the user. Sadly, car manufacturers don't seem to bother to invest the effort to meet any of these conditions.
Timothy probably does underestimate what he doesn't know. And his homepage is not what he wants potential employers to see. Enough people have jumped on him for this.
What no one seems to have mentioned - that the author refers to - is that 90% of so-called programmers are, in fact, not very good. It will be a shame when all IDEs automatically generate getters and setters, because there are a lot of programmers out there who really shouldn't be allowed to do anything much more difficult than that.
Maybe - hopefully - Timothy is one of the 10% who will be really good, once he gets some experience under his belt...
Why oh why don't these countries use incinerators? Incinerators can generate energy out of garbage, and pollution is no longer an issue with modern filters. The metal bits - even nonmagnetic metals like copper and aluminum - can be easily recovered out of the ash and recycled. The remaining ash takes up a fraction of the landfill space otherwise required, and doesn't stink.
Landfills are primitive and wasteful.
Absolutely: the animated leaders are just dumb. The clouds and water effects are cute the first time you see them, and afterwards irrelevant. Civ2 and Civ4 have the best gameplay of the bunch (Civ3 was just a waste). But the resources that CIV-4 eats while just sitting idle (even while minimized!) are just ridiculous.
Reading the description, they are making a lot of changes just for the sake of change, and spending way too much effort on irrelevant graphics. Civ5 promises to be another odd-numbered disappointment.
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So, let's lump all of China together, I mean, it's not like it's very big or anything.
Sure, some parts of China are short of water. Others have plenty. This sort of non-reporting is just ranting by some anti-tech journalist looking for a victim.
not all fish prepared right tastes fishy.
I'll go one farther: no fish, prepared correctly, tastes fishy. The fishy smell comes, AFAIK, from fish oils going rancid. Fish has to be fresh, prepared quickly and served. Alternatively, it can be preserved by smoking or other means - but must, of course, be fresh when processed.
Take trout, as a fish most people know. Wash and scale within a few hours of catching them. Either eat them immediately, or flash freeze them, or smoke them. The cooked fish should not have any fishy smell. Maybe your dishes will, after sitting in the sink a couple of hours, but that's a different problem...
This is offensive. The National Academy is supposed to be a scientific organization, not a pile of lobbiests. The whole AGW mess comes because scientists have mixed up science with politics.
Three simple steps: open mouth, insert foot, destroy credibility.
I have to agree. While it's great that the European countries take privacy seriously, there is a real problem here. If someone transmits radio waves into public space - heck, into your house, your car and through your body - just how can any sensible person say you do not have a right to receive those radio waves? This is especially ridiculous outcomes in the case of wireless networks, since practically every European citizen carries a wireless receiver (in their mobile phone) all the time. There can be no expectation of privacy here.
As a related anecdote, Google has gotten in trouble in Switzerland because their camera is mounted higher than a person's normal eye level. This is a much more valid complaint, as it means that the camera occasionally sees over hedges and fences and into windows that people did reasonably consider to be out of the public view.
An excellent demonstration...of why automation should never attempt to take control of a car. Software errors, hardware failures, unreliable sensor technology, and an endless supply of unforeseeable situations mean that automation simply cannot be reliable.
Example: Our car has collison sensors - in heavy snowstorms, they warn us continually of imminent crashes with snowflakes.
Absolutely right! Most so-called CP laws should be rescinded, because they have nothing whatsoever to do with CP.
The original purpose of CP laws was to protect children from sexual abuse. They were never meant to prevent parents from taking pictures of their kids playing at the waterpark; they should not force parents to undergo background checks before they can set foot in their kids' kindergarten, etc, etc. All of these extensions come at the price of the rights and freedom of the vast majority of innocent people, and do nothing whatsoever to prevent real crime.
Politicians and helicopter parents have pushed this whole area so far beyond common sense that we actually have people (like the poster below) who think the police should get involved if you have several dozen pictures of clothed children! As a coach of a kids team, as a school teacher, or maybe as a grandparent with lots of grandkids, am I going to get a very special interview? Gee, thanks...
If someone forces a child to do something sexual, that is a crime. The original CP laws said: if you purchase a picture of a sexual crime involving a minor, that too is a crime. The justification here is: even though the purchaser had nothing to do with the original crime, by criminalizing purchase, one might be able to dry up the market that supports the original crimes. This original idea was extended to cover possession (not just purchase), which already strays from the original justification.
In recent years, it has been stretched beyond all reason. It makes no sense at all to prohibit innocent pictures (i.e., kids taking a bath, kids at the beach), nor to prohibit activities that do not even involve children (like tasteless cartoons). This is legislating "good taste" and has nothing at all to do with either children or with crime prevention.
If you agree with the parent, and have kids of your own, visit Free Range Kids!
What sensationalist blather. Fusion has been "just around the corner" for 50 years now. Anyway, even if it really is true this time, some environmentalist group would put a stop to it - funny how they think electricity just magically comes out of the plug without having to actually be generated anywhere.
Nothing to see here, move along...
Ok, ok, it's in German. But the article in "Spiegel" starts out by implying this is no big deal. Here's a quick'n'dirty translation of the first bit:
"It sounds momentous: The commissioner for privacy, Peter Schaar, said in a press release that 'Google street view vehicles are equipped with WLAN scanners'. He further explains that he is 'horrified by the purposes to which these scans...are being put'."
The article then goes on to say that a little research reveals that this is all well-known and has been since 2008. This is all legal in Germany, and in fact there are other companies and organizations that do similar things. The article itself mainly informs the user of the general situation, and asks a couple of open questions. In particular, it worries that some over-reacting judge may declare MAC-addresses to be related to personal identity, and therefore subject to privacy regulations.
In a nutshell, it's much ado about nothing, basically a clueless commissioner decides to try to make a name for himself.
The author is right: as you buy bigger screens, you expect a higher pixel count. But this just isn't true anymore. In fact, pixel counts are down from what they were 20 years ago.
The premium 4x3 monitor from Dell: Dell UltraSharp 2007FP, 51 cm ( 20,1" ) has a resolution of 1600x1200.
Twenty years ago, I was running a 21" Viewsonic CRT 2560x1920. Now, their best 22" monitor (not TV, monitor) boasts only 1680x1050.
I understand that LCD-monitors and televions have overlapping markets. What I don't understand is that high resolution monitors are now almost unabtainable. Anyone who does any sort of development surely wants more pixels.
In many other countries, the bank notes are different sizes, and the designs are completely revised every few years. Somehow, the ATMs and bill-counters don't have to be replaced. Probably because they don't rely on 1950s mechanical technology. Even so, it's not hard.As long as the treasury lets it be known that more and more bills will change size, the ATM manufacturers will account for this in new models. Old ATMs will be restricted to handing out the "old size" notes - no problem, because when you administer an ATM, you can decide what bank notes it hands out. By the time all of the bills have been modernized, the ATMs will have been replaced anyway. Seriously, the bills in the US are terrible from an accessibility point of view.
Any reasonable employer supports education for its employees, within reason. There are, of course, abuses possible on both sides: employers who won't pay or offer any time on the job for studying, and employers who are generous and then get taken advantage of.
Basically you want - and should expect - is the middle ground. Both employer and employee benefit from a certification; both should chip in. My previous employer had a really nice policy here for MS certifications: they paid the exam fees and offered you one hour per week for several months that you could use on-the-job for studying. One week each month, that hour was a tutorial plus Q&A session held by the company's top developers.
Just a reminder, for anyone who has not been on the business side of it: the credit card companies would prefer that you used credit cards. That way, instead of a flat fee of a few cents, they take a percentage of the gross. This either cuts into the merchant's margin, or else they will pass it on to you in the form of higher prices. Either way, the credit card companies make out like bandits.
That sounds like my story. I tried EQ, and some other online game (don't remember which). DDO gets a lot right - giving you private instances of dungeons, no gruntwork (mining, crafting, whatever) required to succeed, etc, etc. A fun game, and "free" play means that our family has spent more here than we did at EQ in monthly fees.With EQ, I really resented the weeks when I was paying but had no time to play. The attraction of the DDO model is being able to choose if and when you payg.
This sort of arrangement with a third party is disquieting, and frankly reeks of either desperation or some PHB boss or marketing type who has no understanding of their customers. As the parent said: I will stick around a short while, hoping to hear that they regret ever trying such a bone-headed idea.
Password aging is not only irritating for users, it causes them to choose even worse passwords, or to write their passwords down. If you are lucky, and they do neither of these, then it is very likely that they will use "strong-password-1", "strong-password-2".
If you like sci-fi or fantasy, buy your books from Baen Books. They sell eBooks directly to the customer, no DRM, pricing at about $2 per book (more for collections). Also, they give many books away for free - the first book in a trilogy, etc.
The free books are in the Baen Free Library, the shop is called Webscription.net. Support publishers like this, and the other publishers will have to fall in line.
Well said! There are two problems here.
First, as you point out, the bill is very vague. As we know all too well, that means it will be interpreted to mean whatever the president wants it to mean, regardless of the original intent.
Second, the bill won't do anything particularly useful. If they are really worried about cyber attacks, the answer is to connect critical installations to a hardened, private network. Any connection to the public internet could be restricted to non-critical systems, that could be shut down if necessary.
In the end, this is a bill written by people who know little or nothing about technical realities. But it sounds good and is printed in a fancy font, so it will probably pass...
Which Switzerland do you live in? Also living in Switzerland, I can tell you that there are plenty of cheaper models on the roads. Go look in the parking lot at the Migros (the largest supermarket chain).
What is different is that your car registration must be renewed every two years, and any significant, visible rust is forbidden. Hence, you don't find any rust-buckets or junkers on the roads.
Ah, in that case my apologies. Somehow on the threshold I had set, I saw your comment about seatbelts following an entirely reasonable complaint about the warnings being nuisances. I must have mislooked - and thought the one was the direct reply to the other.
And you, sir, are missing the point. We will almost certainly ask our mechanic if he can disable some of the warnings in our car. Not because we dont wear seatbelts, but because the warnings are a nuisance, and sometimes actually dangerous (see below).
There is the parking assistant that beeps when you are close to an object in front of your car. Fine for parking. Drive slowly in a blizzard, and it beeps at the snowflakes, driving you absolutely nuts in the process.
There is the warning that an object is close behind you. This is supposed to detect automatically if you have a trailer. But sometimes it does not - for no reason we can figure. So you get to tow your trailer, with the car yammering at you the entire trip.
There is the warning for glare ice. Implemented so that anytime the temperature changes to 3 degrees centigrade, it warns you. On dry roads, on wet roads, it doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter if it has already warned you 10 times on the same trip.
Or even take the seat-belt warning: If I go shopping, or put my gym bag on the seat, the thing goes off. Do I really have to strap my groceries and my gym bag in?
Warnings with so many false positives are counterproductive. Either people find them so irritating that they disable the things. Or else they get in the habit of ignoring them. Either way, the warnings wind up useless as such - but they can distract at critical moments.
To illustrate that last: I was driving on nasty, icy roads. My car started to skid on glare ice (by the way, no warning, as it was below 3 degrees outside). At this moment, I discovered a warning I had never heard before: the car knew it was skidding and blared at me. Thanks a lot - I knew bloody well I was skidding, and I really, really did not appreciate that distraction at that particular moment in time.
Warning should (a) essentially never have false positives, (b) only warn you if it something you might not notice on your own (and can do something about), and (c) be configurable by the user. Sadly, car manufacturers don't seem to bother to invest the effort to meet any of these conditions.
Timothy probably does underestimate what he doesn't know. And his homepage is not what he wants potential employers to see. Enough people have jumped on him for this.
What no one seems to have mentioned - that the author refers to - is that 90% of so-called programmers are, in fact, not very good. It will be a shame when all IDEs automatically generate getters and setters, because there are a lot of programmers out there who really shouldn't be allowed to do anything much more difficult than that.
Maybe - hopefully - Timothy is one of the 10% who will be really good, once he gets some experience under his belt...
Why oh why don't these countries use incinerators? Incinerators can generate energy out of garbage, and pollution is no longer an issue with modern filters. The metal bits - even nonmagnetic metals like copper and aluminum - can be easily recovered out of the ash and recycled. The remaining ash takes up a fraction of the landfill space otherwise required, and doesn't stink. Landfills are primitive and wasteful.
We're a bit off topic here, seeing as this has nothing to do with file systems, but being off-topic is on-topic for /.
Anyhow: StoreBackup is a great backup system that automatically detects duplicates.
Just "wow". Everyone who has spent tedious hours "fixing" some piece of "almost" perfect photography just fell off of their chairs.
I haven't bothered upgrading anything but InDesign in recent years - the old Photoshop (or even GIMP) was good enough. This is a reason to upgrade!
Absolutely: the animated leaders are just dumb. The clouds and water effects are cute the first time you see them, and afterwards irrelevant. Civ2 and Civ4 have the best gameplay of the bunch (Civ3 was just a waste). But the resources that CIV-4 eats while just sitting idle (even while minimized!) are just ridiculous.
Reading the description, they are making a lot of changes just for the sake of change, and spending way too much effort on irrelevant graphics. Civ5 promises to be another odd-numbered disappointment.