I would expect any such system to provide sufficient storage to hold the last n hours of data (specified by policy) and for the data to be thrown away after that. This isn't a particularly difficult task for computers to handle.
I would also assume that these cameras would operate on an entirely separate network from any of the rest of the airport's traffic—probably on dedicated fiber runs to their security center that run in the same conduits where the video lines ran before.
In other words, it shouldn't be a significant change for them other than in terms of what they can do with it. If it requires their IT department to do lots of extra work, they got ripped off by the company designing the system.
I think the point was that such statements are falsifiable if it can be shown that the reverse is true. Technology that slows down the security line cannot feasibly make you safer because it causes backups that inherently make you less safe. Therefore, because there is at least one significant reduction in safety, even in the optimal scenario, it can only move the risk around.
Of course, that doesn't apply to passive security technology (these cameras, for example). And these cameras do have a reasonably chance of making you safer. If someone goes through security improperly and tries to get lost in the crowds (which occasionally happens accidentally, but could realistically be used as an attack vector), higher resolution cameras with face detection could make it much easier to not only find the person, but also quickly determine who that person has interacted with inside the terminal, where that person might have hidden contraband, etc.
Further, even when it is accidental, this can eliminate the need to shut down the airport, search everywhere, and re-screen all of the passengers. Although this doesn't make you safer per se, it does reduce your chances of missing your connecting flight.
So I would say that this sort of upgrade is almost inarguably an improvement in air security, unlike most of the other "improvements" over the past decade.
No company has ever been sued because of "crossing some fuzzy line".
Just about no company of any size (other than the Linux distro vendors themselves) has touched anything licensed under GPLv3, either. Most companies are not comfortable with that license. Whether you feel that their fear is rational or not isn't really relevant; that fear still exists, and still drives their behavior.
Yeah, that XOR mangling is intended to be a lightweight DRM to make it slightly harder to copy fonts out of an EPUB, but no EPUB readers support it except Adobe Digital Editions, AFAIK—possibly the Nook reader, since that is based on ADE, but I haven't tried it.
I'm well aware of that. Not sure what part of my post made you think I wasn't. Perhaps my comment about the primary maintainer taking something closed. That's a concern with software (regardless of license, including the GPL) because whenever an organization or company that owns a project's copyright (or enough of the copyright that they can easily rewrite the rest) decides to create a closed-source fork of that project, it generally results in the death of the open source fork of the project, for all intents and purposes. After all, the company was the primary maintainer, so now nobody is maintaining it. Sure, you still have the right to fix bugs yourself, which is certainly better than nothing; it's just not ideal.
Have you ever actually tried to parse a declaration reliably using regular expressions? I have. They just kept getting more and more horrible the more complex the input became, and at some point, after fixing a bunch of bugs, I concluded that it was an insane way of doing things, threw out all the regular expressions, and started over with a tokenizing parser.
Trust me when I say that parsing declarations with even Perl-compatible regular expressions, much less BRE or ERE, is not something you want to attempt if you value your sanity in the slightest.
No, llvm-gcc is GCC. More precisely, it's the GCC front end with the LLVM back end. That's the one the GP was talking about; although it is GCC, it has some hairy edges where it doesn't behave quite like the standalone GCC.
The actual Clang compilers are called clang and clang++.
That's the thing. Free software is not about your freedom, it's about the software's freedom. It is not for the benefit of anyone in particular, it is for the benefit of the whole humanity.
The problem with that argument is that what is best for the software and humanity is not clear cut. Most of the better software out there has significant corporate backing. Far too often, open source software falls into the trap of writing code that "works for me", where "me" is defined as the person who wrote it, yet tends not to "work for me", where "me" is defined as anyone else. Corporate backing tends to fix a lot of that because you have lots of "mes" working on the code, each of whom has a significant interest in making it work correctly and reliably (because they're getting paid to spend their time doing so). Any licensing requirements that are sufficiently onerous to scare away that corporate backing, therefore, tend to result in software of lesser quality.
IMO, the ideal situation is a BSD or similar license with the code owned by a non-profit organization. In this way, you have a reasonable assurance that the code won't suddenly get closed by its primary maintainer, and other companies are unlikely to want to close the code themselves because of the maintenance headaches of keeping a proprietary branch in sync with something that is regularly getting updated by others. However, companies are willing to work on the software and improve it because they don't have to worry about crossing some fuzzy line and getting sued.
I keep hearing people say that SMS messages are effectively free for the carriers, but such statements don't present the whole picture, and as a result, are highly misleading.
Yes, text messages are sent using junk parts of packets that aren't used for anything else. However, there are a limited number of time slots per frequency, and a limited number of frequency slots. Therefore, it is a scarce resource. If text messages were free or nearly so, there is the danger that your text messages would be delayed by hours because of the backlog, making them early useless.
When a backlog does occur, there are only three ways to fix it: add more bandwidth (which costs money), change phones so that they can deliver text messages using data traffic (which effectively takes bandwidth from other things, eventually resulting in the need to add bandwidth, which costs money), or charge a fee so that fewer people send text messages, thus avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
So it is no more "nearly free" than biodiesel made from restaurant grease is nearly free; initially it may seem that way, but as soon as demand builds up, suddenly there's not enough to go around, and the cost of increasing the supply makes it largely infeasible to do so.
Dude. It's Adobe. Judging from their outward appearance, I suspect that their management chain actively discourages fixing bugs because it gets in the way of adding new bloat... err... features.
For example, we've been complaining that the entire CS suite fails to work correctly on case-sensitive HFS+ since... well, since support was introduced back in 10.4. To this day, their shovelware still does not work on Macs so configured. This problem is entirely caused by Adobe being too damn lazy to fix their build scripts to use correct capitalization during the linking phase—a set of fixes that would take at most a couple of hours for a single competent engineer to fix using shell scripts and sed. And some folks have been complaining about this serious flaw in their products for seven years now.
Even more hilariously, Adobe blames Apple, claiming that there are dozens of compiler bugs that they've reported that haven't been fixed, which prevent them from fixing this problem. However, thousands of companies out there have no trouble working on case-sensitive volumes. Likewise, random users have gone through and created symbolic links to work around Adobe's typos and have been able to get it working, which completely invalidates Adobe's ludicrous claims.
Frankly, given how long it has taken them to fix something that simple, it'll be a ***king miracle if Adobe fixes this security bug in less than a decade. After all, if it takes them that long to fix something that would take me a few minutes, they either have to have the most complicated, snarled pile of source control ever seen in the history of the universe or they're all grossly incompetent beyond measure, neither of which inspires much confidence in this security fix for me.
Screw Adobe. The only thing that could make their software quality any worse would be if they got bought by Symantec.
The solution for this, of course, is fiber to the curb, rolled out by the local community, but the telcos tend to sue for unfair competition whenever they try to roll it out.
Alternatively, the telcos could quit being cheap and replace their load coils with coils that have a wider passband. They've been in existence for at least a decade now.
Right. Worst case is about 1.41x, and that's if your blocks are square. The more rectangular they become, the lower the penalty for going around two sides.
Oh, and I would also add that because of the extra time and expense educating them, there's less money and time for everyone else, so even if you factor out all the recent immigrants from the testing pool, they can still have an effect on the education of the general population. This makes any sort of statistical compensation very difficult, and makes various states' numbers hard to compare usefully.
So, what makes both California and DC different from Massachusetts?
That's an easy one. Geography, mostly. Because of all the agriculture resulting from its climate, California has a lot of immigrants (both legal and illegal) coming from Mexico who do not speak English very well when they get here. In particular, the percentge of illegal immigrants (by definition, first-generation) per capital is higher in California than any other state in the U.S., and by a very sizable margin. (Hover over each state's raw number to see the per capita figure.) Therefore, the number of children who are simultaneously learning science while still learning English is higher than anywhere else in the U.S. As a result, there are more kids struggling, who need more individual attention, which means the schools cost more while producing lower test scores.
Which is fascinating, because I've never heard of a watch battery bursting into flame during normal operation, yet this would appear to ban the international shipping of nearly all watches. Lithium ion batteries are a fire risk because of overheating, but probably 99% of the time, the overheating is caused by charging, which lithium primary cells do not do. I understand why you would not want to pack cartons of a hundred lithium primary cells (because if a fire occurs external to the batteries, they tend to intensify it), but a single cell here or there would seem to pose little risk.
In other words, stopping and searching every airline passenger gives you a one in 388 million chance of actually catching a terrorist.
Not quite. Stopping and searching every passenger failed to stop any of those terrorists. What you mean to say is that if the TSA were absolutely perfect at its job, then it would catch at most one terrorist per 388 million passengers screened. Given that 100% detection is impossible in practice, however, and given that they are not, in fact, catching an average of two terrorists per year, I think it is safe to say that the odds are probably much, much lower, and probably orders of magnitude lower on the average.
The point was that 20 seconds isn't actually long enough to do anything else of import anyways
It isn't actually long enough to do much else. However, when you accidentally bump the eject button instead of the pause button and you end up having to wait for the disc to load, followed by that twenty seconds of crap, followed by the time to find where you were, that twenty seconds will make a big difference in how pissed off you get.
It is that sort of experience that has driven me to not buy DVDs from certain companies because of the ads that they make me watch. Now admittedly, that's three or four minutes worth of ads, but it's a slippery slope. The FBI warnings started at about five seconds, and now they're upping it to twenty. If we don't react negatively to this increased annoyance, a few years from now, they'll probably start making us watch one of those obnoxious three minute "You wouldn't steal a box of condoms" ads or whatever the heck they're trying to convince kids to want to steal these days.
Wait, you mean that wasn't meant to make us want to steal a car or a handbag?
How weaponized are they talking about? There are lots of highly toxic substances that exist in a powder or crystalline form and would kill you if you breathed in enough of them. Or, for that matter, simply removing the air filter from a laser printer could potentially put enough toner into the air to pose a fire risk in a small enough enclosed space....
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I would expect any such system to provide sufficient storage to hold the last n hours of data (specified by policy) and for the data to be thrown away after that. This isn't a particularly difficult task for computers to handle.
I would also assume that these cameras would operate on an entirely separate network from any of the rest of the airport's traffic—probably on dedicated fiber runs to their security center that run in the same conduits where the video lines ran before.
In other words, it shouldn't be a significant change for them other than in terms of what they can do with it. If it requires their IT department to do lots of extra work, they got ripped off by the company designing the system.
I think the point was that such statements are falsifiable if it can be shown that the reverse is true. Technology that slows down the security line cannot feasibly make you safer because it causes backups that inherently make you less safe. Therefore, because there is at least one significant reduction in safety, even in the optimal scenario, it can only move the risk around.
Of course, that doesn't apply to passive security technology (these cameras, for example). And these cameras do have a reasonably chance of making you safer. If someone goes through security improperly and tries to get lost in the crowds (which occasionally happens accidentally, but could realistically be used as an attack vector), higher resolution cameras with face detection could make it much easier to not only find the person, but also quickly determine who that person has interacted with inside the terminal, where that person might have hidden contraband, etc.
Further, even when it is accidental, this can eliminate the need to shut down the airport, search everywhere, and re-screen all of the passengers. Although this doesn't make you safer per se, it does reduce your chances of missing your connecting flight.
So I would say that this sort of upgrade is almost inarguably an improvement in air security, unlike most of the other "improvements" over the past decade.
What does that have to do with GPL versus BSD? They're both open source. You can fix bugs in either one.
Just about no company of any size (other than the Linux distro vendors themselves) has touched anything licensed under GPLv3, either. Most companies are not comfortable with that license. Whether you feel that their fear is rational or not isn't really relevant; that fear still exists, and still drives their behavior.
Yeah, that XOR mangling is intended to be a lightweight DRM to make it slightly harder to copy fonts out of an EPUB, but no EPUB readers support it except Adobe Digital Editions, AFAIK—possibly the Nook reader, since that is based on ADE, but I haven't tried it.
I'm well aware of that. Not sure what part of my post made you think I wasn't. Perhaps my comment about the primary maintainer taking something closed. That's a concern with software (regardless of license, including the GPL) because whenever an organization or company that owns a project's copyright (or enough of the copyright that they can easily rewrite the rest) decides to create a closed-source fork of that project, it generally results in the death of the open source fork of the project, for all intents and purposes. After all, the company was the primary maintainer, so now nobody is maintaining it. Sure, you still have the right to fix bugs yourself, which is certainly better than nothing; it's just not ideal.
Have you ever actually tried to parse a declaration reliably using regular expressions? I have. They just kept getting more and more horrible the more complex the input became, and at some point, after fixing a bunch of bugs, I concluded that it was an insane way of doing things, threw out all the regular expressions, and started over with a tokenizing parser.
Trust me when I say that parsing declarations with even Perl-compatible regular expressions, much less BRE or ERE, is not something you want to attempt if you value your sanity in the slightest.
No, llvm-gcc is GCC. More precisely, it's the GCC front end with the LLVM back end. That's the one the GP was talking about; although it is GCC, it has some hairy edges where it doesn't behave quite like the standalone GCC.
The actual Clang compilers are called clang and clang++.
The problem with that argument is that what is best for the software and humanity is not clear cut. Most of the better software out there has significant corporate backing. Far too often, open source software falls into the trap of writing code that "works for me", where "me" is defined as the person who wrote it, yet tends not to "work for me", where "me" is defined as anyone else. Corporate backing tends to fix a lot of that because you have lots of "mes" working on the code, each of whom has a significant interest in making it work correctly and reliably (because they're getting paid to spend their time doing so). Any licensing requirements that are sufficiently onerous to scare away that corporate backing, therefore, tend to result in software of lesser quality.
IMO, the ideal situation is a BSD or similar license with the code owned by a non-profit organization. In this way, you have a reasonable assurance that the code won't suddenly get closed by its primary maintainer, and other companies are unlikely to want to close the code themselves because of the maintenance headaches of keeping a proprietary branch in sync with something that is regularly getting updated by others. However, companies are willing to work on the software and improve it because they don't have to worry about crossing some fuzzy line and getting sued.
No, no, no. You got the punch line wrong. It's "In Soviet Russia, you pay pirate."
I keep hearing people say that SMS messages are effectively free for the carriers, but such statements don't present the whole picture, and as a result, are highly misleading.
Yes, text messages are sent using junk parts of packets that aren't used for anything else. However, there are a limited number of time slots per frequency, and a limited number of frequency slots. Therefore, it is a scarce resource. If text messages were free or nearly so, there is the danger that your text messages would be delayed by hours because of the backlog, making them early useless.
When a backlog does occur, there are only three ways to fix it: add more bandwidth (which costs money), change phones so that they can deliver text messages using data traffic (which effectively takes bandwidth from other things, eventually resulting in the need to add bandwidth, which costs money), or charge a fee so that fewer people send text messages, thus avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
So it is no more "nearly free" than biodiesel made from restaurant grease is nearly free; initially it may seem that way, but as soon as demand builds up, suddenly there's not enough to go around, and the cost of increasing the supply makes it largely infeasible to do so.
Dude. It's Adobe. Judging from their outward appearance, I suspect that their management chain actively discourages fixing bugs because it gets in the way of adding new bloat... err... features.
For example, we've been complaining that the entire CS suite fails to work correctly on case-sensitive HFS+ since... well, since support was introduced back in 10.4. To this day, their shovelware still does not work on Macs so configured. This problem is entirely caused by Adobe being too damn lazy to fix their build scripts to use correct capitalization during the linking phase—a set of fixes that would take at most a couple of hours for a single competent engineer to fix using shell scripts and sed. And some folks have been complaining about this serious flaw in their products for seven years now.
Even more hilariously, Adobe blames Apple, claiming that there are dozens of compiler bugs that they've reported that haven't been fixed, which prevent them from fixing this problem. However, thousands of companies out there have no trouble working on case-sensitive volumes. Likewise, random users have gone through and created symbolic links to work around Adobe's typos and have been able to get it working, which completely invalidates Adobe's ludicrous claims.
Frankly, given how long it has taken them to fix something that simple, it'll be a ***king miracle if Adobe fixes this security bug in less than a decade. After all, if it takes them that long to fix something that would take me a few minutes, they either have to have the most complicated, snarled pile of source control ever seen in the history of the universe or they're all grossly incompetent beyond measure, neither of which inspires much confidence in this security fix for me.
Screw Adobe. The only thing that could make their software quality any worse would be if they got bought by Symantec.
That may well be enough to make me return the disc to the store as defective. Repeatedly.
The solution for this, of course, is fiber to the curb, rolled out by the local community, but the telcos tend to sue for unfair competition whenever they try to roll it out.
Alternatively, the telcos could quit being cheap and replace their load coils with coils that have a wider passband. They've been in existence for at least a decade now.
Right. Worst case is about 1.41x, and that's if your blocks are square. The more rectangular they become, the lower the penalty for going around two sides.
Oh, and I would also add that because of the extra time and expense educating them, there's less money and time for everyone else, so even if you factor out all the recent immigrants from the testing pool, they can still have an effect on the education of the general population. This makes any sort of statistical compensation very difficult, and makes various states' numbers hard to compare usefully.
That's an easy one. Geography, mostly. Because of all the agriculture resulting from its climate, California has a lot of immigrants (both legal and illegal) coming from Mexico who do not speak English very well when they get here. In particular, the percentge of illegal immigrants (by definition, first-generation) per capital is higher in California than any other state in the U.S., and by a very sizable margin. (Hover over each state's raw number to see the per capita figure.) Therefore, the number of children who are simultaneously learning science while still learning English is higher than anywhere else in the U.S. As a result, there are more kids struggling, who need more individual attention, which means the schools cost more while producing lower test scores.
Which is fascinating, because I've never heard of a watch battery bursting into flame during normal operation, yet this would appear to ban the international shipping of nearly all watches. Lithium ion batteries are a fire risk because of overheating, but probably 99% of the time, the overheating is caused by charging, which lithium primary cells do not do. I understand why you would not want to pack cartons of a hundred lithium primary cells (because if a fire occurs external to the batteries, they tend to intensify it), but a single cell here or there would seem to pose little risk.
Yeah. I was going to say.... 0.6 grays is something like an eighth of the LD50.... :-D
Not quite. Stopping and searching every passenger failed to stop any of those terrorists. What you mean to say is that if the TSA were absolutely perfect at its job, then it would catch at most one terrorist per 388 million passengers screened. Given that 100% detection is impossible in practice, however, and given that they are not, in fact, catching an average of two terrorists per year, I think it is safe to say that the odds are probably much, much lower, and probably orders of magnitude lower on the average.
Oh, well heck. That's bloody easy. Step 1. Build a trebuchet. Step 2. Load the Xerox machine into the trebuchet. Step 3. There's no step 3!
It isn't actually long enough to do much else. However, when you accidentally bump the eject button instead of the pause button and you end up having to wait for the disc to load, followed by that twenty seconds of crap, followed by the time to find where you were, that twenty seconds will make a big difference in how pissed off you get.
It is that sort of experience that has driven me to not buy DVDs from certain companies because of the ads that they make me watch. Now admittedly, that's three or four minutes worth of ads, but it's a slippery slope. The FBI warnings started at about five seconds, and now they're upping it to twenty. If we don't react negatively to this increased annoyance, a few years from now, they'll probably start making us watch one of those obnoxious three minute "You wouldn't steal a box of condoms" ads or whatever the heck they're trying to convince kids to want to steal these days.
Wait, you mean that wasn't meant to make us want to steal a car or a handbag?
I'm not conflicted at all. Forcing kids to experience pat-downs just might anger the public enough to force our government to eliminate the bulls**t.
...insist on these rules also applying to the TSA?
How weaponized are they talking about? There are lots of highly toxic substances that exist in a powder or crystalline form and would kill you if you breathed in enough of them. Or, for that matter, simply removing the air filter from a laser printer could potentially put enough toner into the air to pose a fire risk in a small enough enclosed space....